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WINDFALLS 
OF OBSERVATION 



WINDFALLS 
OF OBSERVATION 

GATHERED FOR 

THE EDIFICATION OF THE YOUNG 

AND THE 

SOLACE OF OTHERS 



EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN 

AUTHOR OF " A LITTLE BROTHER OF THE RICH " 
" COUSIN ANTHONY AND I," ETC. 



, NINTH Ev^rM^: ' ' '':'")'" 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1901 






Copyright, 1893, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PHINTINQ AND BOOKBINDINQ COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



CONTENTS 



FAGE 

I. Horse i 

II. Climate iS 

III. Courtship 25 

IV. Marriage and Divorce 49 

V. College 65 

VI. The Tyranny of Things 89 

VII. Wills and Heirs 107 

VIII. The Travel Habit 117 

IX. Newspapers and People " 133 

X. The Mysteries of Life 147 

XI. Missing Senses and New Ones . . . 165 
XII. A Serious Time of Life 181 

XIII. The Question of an Occupation . . . 193 

XIV. Women and Families 213 

XV. As to Death 229 

XVI. Inclinations and Character ..... 237 



vi Contents 



PAGE 

XVII. A Poet and Not Ashamed 249 

XVIII. Some Christmas Sentiments . . . .261 

XIX. Feathers of Lost Birds 275 

XX. Outrageous Fortune 283 

XXI. Certain Individual Views of Major Brace 295 



HORSE 




HORSE 

PEAKING for the State of /«^a^ 
New York and contiguous 
vicinities, it is perfectly safe 
to say that if there were six 
weeks that could be spared 
out of the year without doing it any 
harm, they would be the six weeks be- 
ginning on the first Monday in March. 
They make us a lenten quarantine that 
we have to keep whether we like it or 
not. The real, true spring and May- 
day are put upon the market in these 
latitudes at about the same time. Spring 
threatens sporadically and intermittently 
as early as the middle of April, but so 
long as it yields two sprigs of pneumonia 
to one of arbutus it is hardly worth talk- 
ing about as spring. When base-ball be- 
comes a marketable sport, and one's flan- 
nels have been oppressive three days 
running, then we may begin to believe 

3 



Windfalls of Observation 



that there really is a spring and that we 
are in it. 
aj^oun^ It has been said by a favorite author 

IfiaKs fancy •' 

that at this time of year a young man's 
fancy turns to thoughts of love. That 
may have been so in other climes and 
times, but contemporary observation 
hereabouts persuades the observer that 
what our young men's fancies turn to in 
May, and as much as to anything else, 
is horse. When the town begins to 
warm^ and the mud is known to have 
dried on the country roads, the desire 
to go on or after a quadruped begins to 
wrestle in many minds with the other 
reasonable desires that cost money, and 
in a certain percentage of minds, every 
year, horse prevails. 

A lover, even a successful one, is an 
affecting sight to any one with due ap- 
preciation of the chances he is taking ; 
but only to a man who is ignorant of the 
possibilities of horse-flesh, is a lover half 
so affecting as a young man who is buy- 
ing his first horse. There is so much 
that he does not know, and it will cost 
him such a pretty penny to learn it ! 

4 



Horse 

Still, though a little knowledge of 
horse is a dangerously expensive thing, 
if one can afford to acquire it, it is a 
knowledge that has only one superior in 
its power to add to one's intelligent in- 
terest in life. The noblest study of 
mankind is man, as heretofore ; but the 
study of horse is gloriously supplement- 
ary thereto. It is worth a reasonable 
bit out of one's surplus in the glad, hope- 
ful spring, to get in the way of learning 
how many things a horse may have the 
matter with him and still be able to 
get about. There are so very many of 
them! more than even with the worst J";;"//" 
luck the beginner can hope to learn in 
one season, for a single horse does not 
have them all ; certainly not in any one 
summer. A horse's blemishes are like 
virtues, in that they have to be devel- 
oped ; but the beginner may assure him- 
self that the less he knows about horse 
the more blemishes he will be able to 
develop, so that his ignorance and his 
opportunities of curing it will go hand 
in hand. Craniology is a very interest- 
ing study, but the bumps on your head 

5 



Windfalls of Observation 



Collectors 



come ready-made, or grow out so very 
slowly that you cannot note their prog- 
ress. With the bumps on a horse's legs 
it is different. If the horse is young 
enough, and the country is hilly, or the 
carriage heavy, or if your notions of 
driving or riding are a little crude, a 
notable lot of knobs will sometimes ac- 
cumulate on a set of legs almost while 
you are looking. It is as interesting to 
watch them as it is to see the seeds come 
up in the garden after a warm rain. 

There have been men who have held 
that there was a greater measure of pure 
felicity in being a collector than in ad- 
diction to horse. The collector's hobby 
has two excellent qualities : It is im- 
mensely entertaining and it is compara- 
tively innocent. It tempts men to ex- 
travagance, no doubt, but if they buy 
wisely they get their money back when 
they sell. It gives no man headaches 
in the morning ; nor does it seriously 
interfere with the peace of families, so 
that it is more tolerable than rum or 
flirtation. It is a less hazardous pleas- 
6 



Horse 

ure, too, than horse, which sometimes 
inveigles men into saddles to the peril 
of necks, and which usually, if pursued 
with due zeal, usurps their faculties to 
a degree that is detrimental to the in- 
terests of society. Collectors are usu- 
ally more interested in their treasures 
than in anything else on earth, but it 
must be said for them that the very 
depth of their passion usually operates 
to give it modesty. They are not more 
apt to prate endlessly in mixed society 
about their havings than a lover is to 
talk about his sweetheart. The con- 
sciousness of possession is ordinarily 
enough for them, though, of course, 
when they get among persons whose 
sympathy they know is with them, con- 
versation takes its natural course. 

There is a reasonable fraction of hu- 
man sentiment left in most collectors, 
but the man whose hobby is horse has a 
very limited claim to rank as a biped. 
Books and pictures and jades and " solid 
colors," when once you have got them, 
stay calmly where they are put and 
leave their owners some peace. Not so 

7 



not so bad 



Windfalls of Observation 



ihusiasts. 



the horse. Nothing compares with him 
for intrusiveness except babies. He is 
constantly up to some devilment, devel- 
oping possibilities or impossibilities, get- 
ting colds, ringbones, spavins, nails in 
his feet, strains, curbs, galls, scratches, 
navicular disease, corns, lung difficul- 
ties, heaves, and unascertained worth- 
lessness. Every detriment that shows 
in him shows immediately in his owner, 
whose mind is temporarily unfit for the 
consideration of anything else. The 
horst en- collcctor Can take his first editions out 
and dust them and put them back on 
the shelf, and go out and talk about sil- 
ver-coinage ; but a man who has horse 
seldom comes out of his stable without 
the preoccupied air, which is the ex- 
ternal sign of internal worry. Laws 
designed for the protection of society, 
provide, with more or less success, that 
men shall have but one wife each, at a 
time. But strangely enough, the num- 
ber of horses a man may possess is left 
unlimited, except by his purse and his 
preferences, so that any citizen is at 
liberty to own as many as he can main- 
8 



Horse 

tain, and go about with dimmed and 
distorted faculties, to prey upon the pa- 
tience of his fellow-men. 

If there were no other drawback to 
the horse habit, a respectable argument 
(albeit not a strictly valid one) could be 
reared against it on the ground that it 
necessitates the continued existence of 
horse - dealers. Now the business of Hazards 
horse-dealing, an avocation of large and Vfarhorse^ 
increasing importance, is yet of such i^^jl"^^"" 
peculiar characteristics as to be dis- 
tinctly hazardous to the reputation of 
people who take it up. That there are 
and always have been honest horse- 
dealers it is absurd to doubt, but the 
immemorial experience of mankind in 
buying horses is such that demonstrated 
examples of absolute integrity in selling 
them excite very much the same sort of 
admiration as white plumage on black- 
birds. Of course there is a dearth of 
absolutely honest men anyway, but the 
reputed scarcity of honest horse-dealers 
cannot be entirely due to that. There 
are dishonest grocers but it cannot be 

9 



IVhuifalh of Observation 



said that the grocery business is disrep- 
utable. Such a statement is hardly jus- 
tifiable even of the business of dealing 
in stocks, and if it can be made of horse- 
selling there must be special reasons for 
it. 

There are such reasons, and very good 
ones. They consist largely in the cir- 
cumstance that two extremely uncer- 
tain quantities enter into every sale of 
horses. One of these is the horse, the 
other is the purchaser. From the day 
he is foaled -to the day his hoofs go to 
the glue-factory, every horse is, in a con- 
siderable measure, a matter of opinion. 
There is no absolute certainty what he 
will do until he has done it, and then 
there is no absolute certainty what he 
will do next time. A man under opti- 
mistic influences may see a thousand 
dollars' worth of value in a horse, and 
sell him next day in a pessimistic mood 
for three hundred, and all without any 
variation in the animal or in the state 
of the market, or anything else except 
the owner's feelings. A horse-dealer of 
the sincerest integrity may sell for a 
lo 



Horse 

large sum a horse which gave every in- 
dication of value. Within a week or a 
month the horse may develop an incur- 
able ailment which makes him worth- 
less. Nine times out of ten the inex- 
perienced purchaser believes that the 
dealer cheated him, and an upright man 
endures the imputation of being dishon- 
est as a penalty for dealing in wares that 
are subject to sudden fluctuations of 
value. Of course, the temptations of 
horse-dealing are enormously increased 
by this liability of seemingly sound 
horses to go suddenly and unreasonably 
wrong. Of course, too, a good many 
dealers yield in greater or less measure 
to the stress of these temptations. 
Thus one reason why the reputation of 
the business is so doubtful is that so 
many men who go into it too readily 
convince themselves that caveat emptor 
applies as properly to the vendor's rep- 
resentations as to the wares. But an- 
other reason is that it is so difficult for 
even a very Bayard of horse-dealers to 
avoid the imputation of cheating which 
he did not do. 



Windfalls of Observation 



But that the reputations of honest 
men are apt to be impaired in horse- 
dealing is really not the fault of the 
horse so much as of the other variable 
quantity, the purchaser. Horses are 
subject to preventable as well as un- 
foreseen detriment. The more valuable 
they are, the easier it is to ruin them 
by misuse or neglect. The dispositions 
and habits of horses, particularly of 
young horses, may easily be spoiled in 
a very little while by the ignorance or 
spitefulness of grooms. The average 
horse-buyer knows little about horses, 
and less about grooms. If he pays a 
fair sum for a horse, and the animal 
goes lame or grows vicious, he is apt to 
assume and to proclaim that he has 
been cheated. Whereas the mischief 
may have been wholly unforeseen by the 
seller, or may all have been done in the 
buyer's own stable, of the workings of 
which he has about as much practical 
knowledge as contemporary scientists 
have of home life on the planet Mars. 
Inasmuch as the horse - dealer's busi- 
ness reputation rests very largely on the 

X2 



Horse 

buyer's testimony, it is evident that the 
honest dealer who values his fair fame 
has got to be almost as careful to whom 
he sells as what he sells. 

Thus we see what an extra-hazardous 
occupation horse-dealing is, and how 
many reasons careful men can find for 
keeping out of it. But as a matter of 
fact, men never do keep out of the haz- 
ardous occupations. There is a recog- 
nized charm about uncertainties, and 
they are never more alluring than when 
they go on four legs, and haul carts, or 
jump fences. Men not only sell horses 
in increasing numbers for profit, but 
they dabble in the business out of sheer 
love of adventure and horse, and sell 
quadrupeds to friend or foe, reckless of 
the fact that every beast that passes 
through their hands is a hostage given 
to society. Such men are the chief in- 
stigators of horse-shows, which are use- 
ful in stimulating trade, and giving them 
a chance to show their stock, and, above 
and beyond that, m educating buyers so 
that they shall not only desire good 
horses, but shall know them, and know 

13 



Windfalls of Observation 



what to do with them after they are 
bought. In the improvement of the 
horse and the education of the buyer 
lies the honest horse - dealer's hope. 
When sound horses stay sound after 
they are sold, and buyers learn what 
they may and what they may not expect, 
virtue in the horse business will be surer 
of its reward, and honesty will seem 
more like a policy and less like a quix- 
otic whim. 



14 



II 

CLIMATE 




CLIMATE 

CORRESPONDENT who 
lately wrote in rather a pes- 
simistic vein from Los An- 
geles, averred that the mo- 
notony of the climate there 
was a depressing influence. There was 
not difference enough between the sea- 
sons, she said, to give to life that varie- 
gated flavor which is so acceptable, and 
goes so far to prevent the soul's palate 
from being jaded. When the corre- 
spondent's letter had been printed and 
found its way back whence it came, the 
local journals immediately denied all in 
it that was disparaging, and explained 
that the writer took sad views of life 
because of disappointment in a trans- 
action in corner-lots. Whether South- 
ern California lacks seasons or not is a 
question of fact that is best settled on 
the spot, where daily instances of the 

17 



Windfalls of Observation 



Some re- 
■markable 
results of 
physical 
conditions. 



climate may be put in evidence. Prob- 
ably it doesn't ; but if it does, its defi- 
ciency is a serious one. 

We of New York and New England 
and the comparatively effete East abuse 
our climate a good deal, and sometimes 
with plenty of reason. Professor Shaler 
has said that " it is rather to the physi- 
cal conditions of North America than to 
any primal capacity on the part of its 
indigenous peoples to take on civiliza- 
tion that we must attribute the failure 
of indigenous man within its limits to 
advance beyond the lowest grades of 
barbarism." No doubt he is right about 
that. Physical conditions include cli- 
mate, and North America, the best 
parts of it, is blessed with what may 
be termed a rot-you-before-you-are-ripe 
climate. An indigenous people have 
never been able to mature in it in a de- 
liberate and thorough manner, but have 
invariably acquired a precocious, sickly 
smartness, and perished off the soil, 
leaving mounds, arrow-heads, embroi- 
dered moccasins, and sculptured cities 
behind them. The climate infuses irre* 
i8 



Climate 



sistible energy in the folks that it acts 
upon, and they ripen too soon. The 
continent is a sort of forcing-bed. But 
while it it is impossible for indigenous 
races to come to much in it, it is 
possible to get wonderful results from 
transplantation. Full-grown English- 
men, Dutchmen, and Germans, brought 
here full of blood and sluggish strength, 
have been amazingly quickened, and 
have sometimes made greater progress 
here in a decade than their brethren at 
home have made in a century. A spe- 
cial marvel that is apposite is the effect 
of American air upon the Irish. Almost 
all of the Irish are well known to be of 
royal extraction, but at home the stock 
had fallen into decline. Not only have 
their abilities in general been notably 
quickened by sniffing the free American 
breezes, but in particular it is found that 
when the Celt sets foot on America's 
shore an instinct of being boss, which in 
many cases had slept in his blood for tens 
of centuries, springs as if by magic into 
full-sized life, and the long-lost prince 
drops his hod and steps out a ruler of men. 

19 



IVindfalls of Observation 



But the climate is as wearing as it is 
stimulating. It uses up the materials 
in an emigrant race presently ; and then 
if the members don't take very good 
care of themselves, they waste away. 
Nevertheless, we ought not to forget 
that whatever its defects are, it is par- 
celled out to us in excellent variety. It 
is a vast inconvenience in summer some- 
times to have to pick up a sick baby and 
rush for the seashore or the hills ; and 
in the winter there is pneumonia and the 
whole family of throat and lung expe- 
riences ; and in the spring there is the 
liver. But it is a well-seasoned climate 
all the same, and where we are not too 
set upon getting our whole annual expe- 
rience of it in any one spot, it does as 
well by us as any climate can be expect- 
ed to do by people of desires and infirm^ 
ities such as ours. It is our duty not 
merely to make the best of it, but to 
The value make the most of it. Does the valued 

of seusons, 

and intelligent reader take pains to do 
that ? Does he fully realize that in liv- 
ing in a climate that is seasoned he en- 
joys opportunities which all people do 
20 



Climate 



not have ? And is he prepared for in- 
dustrious and painstaking appreciation 
commensurate with his chances ? Let 
him consider peoples whose lot is cast in 
regions where the meteorological vicis- 
situdes are unimportant. Take the good 
people of Hayti, whose vitals are never 
frozen up ; or the Esquimaux, or Ice- 
landers, who never really get thawed 
out. Are they over-bright, these worthy 
folks ? Read what Ibsen has found it 
necessary to write to enlighten the sim- 
plicity of his compatriots ; inquire as to 
the experience of Hayti since Toussaint 
L'Ouverture's revolt ; and draw such 
conclusions as you must as to the use- 
fulness of due alternations of freeze and 
melt in making men's wits active and 
promoting their energies. There is said 
to be foliage in the tropics of a certain 
sort, great lazy leaves for which the 
botanists have names ; but where there 
are to be oak or maple leaves, or hick- 
ory or beech, the sap must run up the 
trunk in the spring. Leaves with come- 
and-go to them, and wood with a snap 
in it, are not the product of those all- 

21 



Windfalls of Observation 



the-year-round climates. Similarly men. 
We are the salt of the earth, brethren ; 
and it is to the shifting of our seasons 
that we owe very much of our savor. 
And therefore we ought to make it 
more of a religious duty to get the very 
most out of our seasons that we can. 

And especially make the most of the 
spring. It is a trial oftentimes. It 
makes heavy the heads of men and pains 
them in the small of their backs ; but 
that is precisely because they neglect it, 
and take no pains to accommodate them- 
selves to its requirements. For its spirit 
is exacting in proportion to its value. 
It is the season of moods, of introspec- 
tion, retrospection, meditation, procras- 
tination, forecasts ; of waiting around 
the spring, for things to begin ; of catching the 
germs of enterprises to be hatched dur- 
ing the summer and launched into activ- 
ity when the energies recur in the fall. 
It is a season that men are too much in- 
clined to crowd, and it avenges itself on 
them for their unwisdom. Do not hurry 
it ! Give it time to work itself out in 
you ! Dawdle a little ! If you cannot 

22 



Go to meet 



Climate 



get into the woods, get into the parks ; 
and when you cannot get to the parks, 
saunter on the avenues, and stop long 
before the flower-shop windows. Go to 
meet the spring if you can. Go to 
Washington in April ; there you cannot 
hurry. There you must saunter and 
dawdle, and invite your soul to make 
suggestions to you. Go down the Po- 
tomac. Sit in the sun in Lafayette 
Square and listen to things as they 
grow. There you will hear the identi- 
cal lenes susurri that caught the Hora- 
tian ear in the Campus Martins. There 
there is an atmosphere ; there you have 
sunshine overhead, green grass under- 
foot, and the past and the present and 
the future all about you. Get a taste of 
a Washington spring, if only once ; for 
it will come back to your senses as often 
as spring itself returns, and as often as 
it comes you will bless it. 



23 



Ill 

COURTSHIP 




COURTSHIP 

|F any one has his choice 
about where he shall grow 
up, let him stipulate for a 
family in which there are 
singers. It is a sore pity to 
grow up where there is no singing. In 
earlier days an American child's chances 
were better than now of being born 
into a reasonably large family ; and 
though in some families all the members Scngimhe 

. ... , . . household 

have music m them, and m others none, 
of course the more there are the better 
the chances of song. Song is almost 
pure gain. It need not be of very high 
quality so long as it emanates naturally 
from inside of the singer, and does him 
good. Its value as an appurtenance to 
domestic life lies not in its merit as a 
performance, but in its success as an 
expression of the feelings. Singing as 
a fine art is, of course, worth cultivat- 
27 



Windfalls of Observation 



as an acces- 



ing ; but the species of song that we are 
now talking about, is of the same sort 
as the singing of birds and of negroes. 
Ordinary, normal children ought to learn 
it by ear as they do language ; and they 
should sing because they are happy, as 
the birds do. A child that grows up 
where there is no singing, no more gets 
his rights than a young robin that is 
hatched out in an incubator. The robin 
is pretty sure to sing when he grows up 
and is turned loose in the sunshine, 
whether his ear got any early culti- 
vation or not, for the habit has been 
strong in the robin family for genera- 
tions. But if the child does not get his 
singing instincts developed by example 
while he is a child, they may stay asleep 
permanently. 

It appears that the best singing of 



'^urtthii> ^i^ds is performed as an accessory to 
courtship. Certainly it is that way with 
humans ; and a child whose parents are 
past the singing age, or have had the 
song stopped out of their lives by too 
much cloudy weather, may still have 
tunes running in his head, and sentiment 
28 



Courtship 



percolating through his soul, if only he 
has an elder sister with a proper string 
of beaux. Just what the songs of court- 
ship are in this decade, the lovers of this 
decade best know. A quarter of a cen- 
tury ago there was a set that are still 
running in the heads of middle-aged 
people, and that will continue to run in 
the heads of some of them for a quarter 
of a century to come. 

In that period, as doubtless now, there 
were songs of encouragement and songs 
of consolation, songs for the right man 
who came at the right time, and for the 
wrong man, and for the right man who 
came at the wrong time. Particularly 
there were songs for the right man 
who came forever too late, after the 
wrong man had put the bars up and was 
sitting on top of them with a gun across 
his knees. The song in these cases came 
floating through the bars. " I'll hang my 
harp on a willow-tree," was a prevalent 
ditty in those days, and a great favorite 
with the wrong man, as it is bound to be 
in every generation that it can reach. 
Another particularly serviceable ballad 
29 



Windfalls of Observation 



was worn smooth in the service of the 
wrong man, being sung sometimes by 
the man himself to drown his misery, and 
again by the maiden, with the design of 
letting him down as tenderly as pos- 
sible. It began, "Yes, I know that you 
once were my lover ;" and it ended — 
some readers may remember it — with 
this time-honored sentiment : 

.- *' I can love you indeed as a brother, 
But my heart is Jo Hardy's alone." 

The tender mercies of the wicked are 
said to be cruel, and perhaps they are, 
absolutely speaking. But compared with 
the tender mercies of the betrothed 
maiden to the wrong man, they certainly 
seem less harsh. 

One of the songs that used to be sung 
by the right man twenty-five years ago, 
was " Kathleen Mavourneen." As often 
as not they used to sing it together. It 
is an old song now as songs go, and it is 
hardly probable that the lovers of this 
generation often sing it. There must be 
biggish children who have never heard 
it. Poor lovers ! Poor children ! the 

30 



Courtship 



middle-aged will say : " It must be hard 
to have to grow up like that ! " Indeed, 
there was once an incurable enthusiast — 
he must be middle-aged now — who used 
to aver that when he got to be rich 
enough to have what he wanted, he was 
going to employ a military band, with a 
solo cornet player, to play " Kathleen 
Mavourneen " in the garden underneath 
his window at sunrise every fair morning 
in the month of June. 

So it seems that, although an old song 
Is the synonyme of worthlessness to any 
one who doesn't know it, with any one 
who ever really took it in, it passes cur- 
rent always. One and indivisible is a 
man and the songs he heard when he 
was young, provided he heard any. 

And speaking of the old songs and 
their associations, what is a man to do 
about those interesting possibilities that 
he calls his first loves ? I say '* possi- 
bilities," using the plural (and thereby 
doing violence, perhaps, to popular pre- 
judice), because of the conviction that 
experience does not always teach enough, 

31 



Windfalls of Observation 



and that in a good many cases expe- 
riences are needed. If there are any 
agencies which are more usefully instruc- 
tive than first loves in ripening adol- 
escence into manhood, this deponent 
knoweth them not, and his ears are 
erect, and his eyes intent for the cata- 
logue of them. 
First -^y ^^st loves be it understood to in- 

^^" elude not only that preliminary being 

who first makes the incipient man aware 
of a peculiarity in his affections, but all 
the constellation of beings, more or less 
angelic, who become the successive 
guiding stars of his existence, from the 
time he achieves tailcoats until some 
woman takes him for better or worse, 
with all the fruits of a protracted train- 
ing in him. Of course there are some 
individual males who find their pole-star 
at the first essay, and never wobble af- 
terward in their courses. The limited 
knowledge of men of this sort may pre- 
vent them from realizing that their ex- 
perience is exceptional. They must go 
to the books to learn what is the common 
lot of common men, and there is no book 

32 



Courtship 



that recalls itself at this moment to which 
they can go to better purpose than to 
Edmond About's "Story of an Honest 
Man." There they will discover, if they 
need it, how the impact of successive 
entities upon the affections may hammer 
them at last into a durable article, grace- 
ful to contemplate, and able to stand the 
wear and tear of a work-a-day life. 

Now as to those several entities. Many 
a man, unlike About's autobiographical 
hero, feels constrained to regard them 
as monuments of his own inconstancy 
and weakness, and either buries his 
memories of them in unmarked graves, 
or recalls them shamefacedly and with a 
very sneaking sort of tenderness. The 
greater fool he ! I miss the proper point 
of view if such half-hearted sentiments to be cher* 
are not mistaken ; and if, by entertain- luays. 
ing them, he does not needlessly con- 
tribute to blot out some of the most 
charming and interesting oases in all his 
desert of a past. A lad at college, though 
college for the time is all the world to 
him, does not deem it necessary to forget 
that he was once at school : nor does a 



33 



Windfalls of Observation 



man new launched in the real world 
affect to forget that he was once a part 
of the microcosm known as college. In- 
deed, the difficulty often is to make a 
college man remember anything else. 
But, by a very prevalent affectation, a 
married man is supposed to forget that 
eyes are fine in more than one color, or 
that other agencies than age or dye 
have ever been potent to change his 
views as to the proper hue of hair. The 
truth is, to be spoken flatly and with 
confidence that it is the truth, that a 
man who does not love his first loves 
all his life long makes a great mistake 
and does injustice to his own past. But, 
of course, he is to love them as they 
were. The affection they inspired in 
him, when they did inspire it, is a part 
of himself for all time, and they, as they 
then seemed, are a part of him too, and 
it is as idle for him to try to eradicate 
them from his actuality as for the leop- 
ard to attempt to change spots with the 
Ethiopian. That he should love what 
they may become with the lapse of years 
is manifestly inexpedient and unreason- 

34 



Courtship 



able, as well as usually improper, if for 
no other reason, because 

" One must not love another's." 

There was obviously a corner in 
Praed's heart where "the ball-room's 
belle " had permanent lodgings, but ob- 
viously, too, he had no special tender- 
ness for " Mrs. Something Rogers," but 
regarded her, no doubt, with an interest 
that was always friendly, but never un- 
comfortably acute, as one is apt to regard 
the cocoon from which some particularly 
lovely butterfly has escaped. True al- 
ways to the butterfly, doubtless Praed 
disassociated it from Mr. Something 
Rogers's cocoon. When the fledgling 
Pendennis loved the Fotheringay, he 
loved her from his hat to his boot-soles, 
and don't imagine that he ever succeed- 
ed — even if he was fool enough to try — 
in erasing that lovely image from his 
memory. The Fotheringay saw the be- 
ginning of a habit of woman-worship of 
which, in due time, Laura reaped the 
benefit. And there was Genevieve ! 

35 



Windfalls of Observation 



What an education she was to Coleridge! 
And can you imagine that he ever re- 
canted, whatever Mrs. Coleridge's bap- 
tismal name may or may not have been! 
Men may as well make up their minds 
— ^and women, too — that first loves are 
facts — most respectable and laudable 
facts, and not shadows ; and while they 
need not be obtruded on a world that is 
not interested in them, they are neither 
to be snubbed nor denied, but respect- 
fully entertained and cherished. Of all 
history, the most instructive to a man is 
his own. He can keep it to himself, if 
he will, and oftentimes it is very proper 
that he should, but he cannot afford to 
forget any of it. The discreditable parts 
he must remember as a warning to him- 
self, and the rest, his first loves among 
them, to encourage him. 

One of the parts that will make him 
blush, when he recalls it, is his callow 
and dishonest attitude toward that ad- 
junct of courtship, the maiden's natural 
protector. In a letter announcing that 
he would visit me, a certain young friend 

36 



Courtship 



says : " It is a year since I have had a 
talk with you, and this is the time of all 
others when I feel the need of taking 
counsel with you over certain matters." 
I daresay the matters that he wants 
to talk over are not more momentous 
than whether checked trousers or striped 
are best suited to the conformation of 
his maturing legs ; nevertheless, his no- 
tice sends a momentary chill down my 
spine. The trouble is that he is at that 
unscrupulous age when youths of aver- 
age sentiment and no definite expecta- 
tions make no bones at all of falling 
desperately in love, and appealing to 
the most available elder to know what 
to do about it. 

Now, he is a fairly prudent lad, and 1 
cannot really believe that he is coming 
to me with any such audacious confes- 
sion ; but if he does, my mind is per- 
fectly made up as to what I shall say to 
him. I shall show no more sympathy 
for him than if he were an intending 
burglar meditating on the expediency 
of breaking into some honest house- 
holder's tenement. I shall treat his 

37 



Windfalls of Observation 

case as lightly as if it were measles, cal- 
lously assuring him that it is a thing to 
be endured while it lasts, but which calls 
for no action more fundamental than, 
possibly, a brief season of retirement 
from society, followed by a spirited re- 
sumption of the ordinary duties of life. 
One thing in particular I shall insist 
upon, out of mere reasonable regard for 
fathers of daughters — a class to which I 
have recently come to find myself be- 
long. I shall not permit him to attempt 
any dealings with the individual known 
to persons in his state as " the old man." 
** The old He shall not be suffered, if I can help it, 

man " has ' *^ ' 

somt rights, to make a conscientious parent acces- 
sory in any degree to his callow infatua- 
tion. He shall himself bear the burden 
of his complaint, and the full responsi- 
bility of his recovery, and there shall be 
no bringing down of gray hairs or inter- 
ruption of parental repose with untime- 
ly worriment. It will be time enough 
for him to tackle the old man when 
he has prospects, at least, to divulge to 
him. 

But all counsellors will not be so coh' 

38 



Courtship 



siderate as I of the old man's comfort. 
He will have a lot of bad quarter-hours 
between now and next spring. It is har- 
vest time for the summer's sowing of 
flirtation, and before it ends and the 
crop is all in, too many careful parents 
will wonder whether they are in truth 
kind fathers, solicitous for the welfare 
of their girls, or " bouncers " employed 
in a matrimonial agency. All the world 
loves a lover, and is anxious to see him 
win ; but nobody seems to care for the 
old man, or have a reasonable apprecia- 
tion of his trials. What is he to do, 
poor old chap, when Romeo, with a bold 
front and a heart quaking with conscious 
malfeasance, discloses that during the 
prevalence of the last full moon but two, 
he and Juliet, discovered that they were 
affinities, and an experience of eight 
weeks has confirmed them absolutely in 
that conviction. Being as yet a bache- 
lor of arts not lucrative, Romeo does 
not feel warranted in asking for an im- 
mediate marriage, but feels bound, as 
a man to whom deception is abhorrent, 
to put Mr. Capulet in possession of the 

39 



Windfalls of Observation 



facts, and learn the conditions, if any, 
on which he will assent to his daugh- 
ter's betrothal. Poor old Capulet ! He 
knows the Montagues ; a most respect- 
able but too abundant family, with tastes 
disproportionately poUte to the dimen- 
sions of their income. He is aware that 
Romeo is just out of the college where 
it strained his father's means to keep 
him, and has yet to make the first prac- 
tical demonstration of wage-earning ca- 
pacity. He has no personal objection 
to Romeo, but he is perfectly aware that 
to permit his engagement to Juliet is 
tantamount to a guarantee that an in- 
come shall presently be forthcoming on 
which they may marry ; which income, 
so far as it is possible to forecast, will 
have to take the form of periodical 
checks signed " Hiram Capulet." 
itfiastobe Poor old Capulet ! He doesn't think 
kindtohitn. jt fair that honors should be thrust upon 
him like that. It is too much like hold- 
ing up his hands at the request of an 
enterprising brigand. He is not ready 
to say yes, and knowing that the old 
man who hesitates is lost, he says no, 
40 



Courtship 



politely, but with decision. He will 
make no conditions or concessions, nor 
make himself a party to Romeo's 
schemes in any shape or manner. So 
Romeo finds himself left on his own 
hands, with his fortune still to win, and 
on such terms with old man Capulet as 
must make it embarrassing for him to 
sit for any length of time in the moon- 
light on the Capulet's garden fence. 
And all his own fault, too. He had only 
to hold his tongue and go to work, and 
he might have led the Capulet german 
next winter, and worn holes in the car- 
pet under that hospitable family's ma- 
hogany, both in town and in the coun- 
try, for several seasons to come — until, 
indeed, he could broach his project to 
the old man with reasonable expectation 
of a welcome. As it is, of course, he 
isn't necessarily beaten, but he has got 
an unnecessary set-back, and all because 
he would try to shift the responsibility 
of his own enterprise on to shoulders 
where it did not belong. And not only 
has he damaged his own cause, but he 
has inflicted on the old man a very dis- 

41 



Windfalls of Observation 



agreeable job, which he had not de- 
served, and which probably made him 
hate himself for half the night and all 
the next day. 

My counsel-seeker shall do no such 
thing as that. He may adore Juliet 
from her hat-pin to her heels just as 
much and just as long as she will let 
him, and he may impart to her such dis- 
creet intimation of his sentiments as he 
thinks it profitable to disclose and she 
to hear ; but upon the old man he shall 
not intrude until affairs are in such a 
state that his consent has become mere- 
ly a felicitous incident of an inevitable 
event. It is not the young fellow that 
wants his girl that the old man respects, 
but the man who is ready to take her. 
The story is familiar (and, doubtless, au- 
tobiographical) of the eminent American 
humorist who, having made up his mind 
that it was time to speak, approached 
the old man, inquiring, " Judge, have 
you noticed anything going on between 
Miss Lizzie and me ? " And getting 
a negative response, retorted, " Well, 
Judge, look sharp and you will." The 

42 



Courtship 



eminent humorist's method was rather 
more abrupt than I should recommend, 
but it showed the right spirit, such as 
can only be shown by the right man at 
the right time. If my young friend 
should prove to have reached a crisis of 
this sort, and is not ready to meet it in 
just such a spirit, I shall recommend 
him to lie low ; and if he feels that he 
must tackle the old man now, to take 
counsel of a recent comic paper and do 
it by letter, anonymously. 

And further, as to courtship : — Owing Longen- 
to the complications of modern life, and ^'^^'^^"**' 
the large increase in the list of creature 
comforts which polite people have come 
to regard as necessaries, marriage has 
become a vastly more serious undertak- 
ing than it used to be, and is deferred 
until a later period of life. People in 
cities who have been used to wear good 
clothes, and to have servants to wait on 
them, and to go out of town in summer, 
no longer marry when the girl is eigh- 
teen and the man twenty-two. The man 
is apt to be nearing thirty before his in- 

43 



Windfalls of Observation 



come will stand the matrimonial strain, 
and the maid is proportionately expe- 
rienced. It would not be quite accurate 
to say that, though it is harder to get 
married than it was, it is as easy as ever 
to become engaged. That would not be 
quite true. The difficulty of getting in- 
come enough to marry does defer, and 
even prevent, a great many betrothals ; 
nevertheless, engagements do often hap- 
pen when the prospect of marriage is 
remote, and a reasonable percentage of 
them last until marriage ends them. 
Long engagements are not popular, but 
enough of them are running to make the 
behavior of their beneficiaries a fit sub- 
ject for comment in the interest of hu- 
man happiness. 

Now, society's attitude toward lovers 
is favorable, but lovers make a serious 
mistake when they presume too far on 
the strength of the world's traditional 
regard for them. The polite world loves 
its lovers exactly so long as they are 
interesting and agreeable. When they 
cease to be so, its sentiments toward 
them take the form oi anxiety to have 

44 



Courtship 



them married, which may indeed be so 
extreme as to result in practical efforts 
to put them in the way of pairing, but 
which is more apt to take the form of 
what is vulgarly known as the cold 
shoulder. Lovers who are intelligent, 
and who are disposed to make them- 
selves agreeable, ought to be exception- 
ally charming. They are enveloped in 
a pleasant blaze of sentiment which 
makes them interesting. So long as 
they are nice, all kind people are in a 
conspiracy to indulge them and make 
them think that life is lurid with rose- 
tints. Their politeness is the more ap- 
preciated because it is thought to in- 
volve especial self-sacrifice, and what- 
ever they do for the community's amuse- 
ment is rated above its ordinary value 
because they have done it. ^^^^^.^ 

All the worse, then, when lovers re- ^o/>er 

' ' thereto. 

gard themselves as temporarily exempt 
from the ordinary obligations of polite- 
ness, and abandon themselves to spoon- 
ing and mutual absorption. The sort of 
courtship that goes on for hours behind 
closed doors, that insists upon seclusion 

45 



IVindfalts of Observation 



and resents a third person, that thinks 
first of the beloved object and not at all 
of anyone else — this may do for a six- 
weeks* intermission between maiden- 
hood and marriage ; but long engage- 
ments should be conducted on radically 
different lines. Was there ever a dearer 
sweetheart than Lorna Doone, whose 
maidenly reserve allowed John Ridd one 
kiss a day, and no spooning whatever ? 
And do you remember Mary Garth, so 
true to her not-any-too-eligible Fred, 
and yet so strait and strict with her- 
self? Engaged or not, she must sure- 
ly have been a welcome companion in 
any house, Fred or no Fred. And, 
again, that dame in silver-gray who 
married John Halifax — be sure that her 
betrothal was a modest and unselfish 
one. 

Lace yourself straitly, Mistress Lucy, 
and encourage Colin to understand that 
while you stay under the paternal roof 
the obligations of that shelter are on 
you, and forbid you to concentrate all 
your courtesy on a single guest. It will 
be time enough to be engrossed and ex- 

46 



Courtship 



elusive when the parson has given you 
his blessing ; and having a roof of your 
own, you may properly decide whom it 
shall shelter, and what shall be the 
measure of its hospitality. 



47 



IV 

MARRIAGE AND DL 
VORCE 




MARRIAGE AND DI- 
VORCE 

|UT it is a perversion of dili- 
gence to formulate stand- 
ards of behavior for engaged 
persons, if it is true, as di- 
vers otherwise unemployed 
persons insist, that the institution of is marriage 
holy matrimony is on its last legs. The ^^^■^^^^«^-' 
idea that marriage is getting out of date 
has become so familiar since Mona 
Caird slipped its leash some years ago, 
that it no longer startles. It has set- 
tled down into a subject for regular dis- 
cussion, like the Behring Sea difficulty, 
or coinage, or the alleged misrule in 
American cities. A recent writer in the 
Westminster Review produced official sta- 
tistics, from England, France, Germany, 
and the United States, to show that the 
matrimonial habit was losing its hold ; 
and in a late North American Mrs. Wells 

51 



Windfalls of Observation 



gave so many good reasons why more 
girls do not marry as to make a reader 
wonder why any girl should ever marry 
at all, unless sentenced to do so by a 
court of law. 

Tolstoi insists that the whole institu- 
tion is rotten and sinful ; but Tolstoi is 
so palpably hipped that his anathemas 
are hardly profitable to discuss. Mona 
^17rd>s Caird's theories it is at least possible 
plan. to consider. She does not believe in 

the modification of marriage by petty 
changes in the laws, nor yet in its abol- 
ishment. She believes in marriage by 
private contract. She thinks that peo- 
ple should be allowed, under gradually 
lessening restrictions, to make their own 
marriage bargain, and she believes that 
they would stick to bargains that they 
chaffered over for themselves a good 
deal more successfully than to such as 
they pick up ready-made. It seems that 
Mona Caird's marriages would be part- 
nerships terminable according to the con- 
ditions of the contract, at proper inter- 
vals, or by mutual consent at any time, 
as other partnerships are. Such is the 

52 



Marriage and Divorce 



elegant diversity of marriage laws al- 
ready existing in the several States of 
this Union, that it seems as if her theo- 
ries might get an approximately fair 
trial here without any new preliminary 
legislation. As it is, by selecting the 
American State in which they chose to 
be joined, people might be married in 
different degrees, according to their 
hopes or confidence in their own charac- 
ters. Couples who retained doubts of 
their own stability could be married by 
justices of the peace in Rhode Island, 
New Jersey, or Delaware. Those whose 
hopes were stouter could have a civil 
marriage in New York, and church mar- 
riages could be reserved for people who 
were really enough in earnest to stand 
up and solemnly take each other for 
better or worse, for good and ill. The a bad way. 
objections, however, to such a plan are 
manifold. For one thing, making the 
best of a marriage is a form of disci- 
pline that is often of the highest value to 
the character ; but few people would be 
at much pains to improve themselves in 
just that way if marriage should cease to 

53 



Windfalls of Observation 



be even theoretically permanent. But 
perhaps the most striking objection is 
that it would so complicate courtship. 
At present the custom is to get married 
first, and settle the conditions after the 
fact. No man and woman discuss like 
sane beings how much they will marry. 
Such a discussion would only be pos- 
sible to two sophisticated humans, en- 
dowed, both of them, with such an active 
sense of humor as would certainly keep 
them from becoming more than friends. 
When there is marrying to be done some- 
body has got to be in the deadest ear- 
nest about it. Marriage may result when 
both parties are in dead earnest, or 
where one is in earnest and one acqui- 
escent, or where the friends or relatives 
are in earnest and both the parties are 
acquiescent. But it may be doubted if 
people in sufficient command of their 
wits and their sense of humor to discuss 
comfortably whether they had better 
marry at all, and if so for how long and 
to what extent, are in a state desperate 
enough to warrant their entering the 
marriage state at all. Punch's advice 

54 



Marriage and Divorce 



was meant for such as they, and they 
would take it. Courtship, as at present 
conducted, is as though the man who 
had gained by persuasive arts a measure 
of the woman's confidence, led her out 
to the end of a pier. The water is deep 
blue, and you can't see the bottom. He 
invites her to jump in with him, and it 
depends upon the degree of satisfaction 
she finds in his company, and her opin- 
ion of his ability to fetch her ashore, 
whether she complies. Mona Caird 
would have her say : " I will not jump 
off here, where it is over my head ; but 
if you will come nearer the shore, where 
the water is not above my knees, per- 
haps I may jump off with you there ; 
then if we don't like it we can wade 
ashore." But then the man would say : 
"No! wading is not swimming. There 
are plenty of girls who are willing to be 
sisters to me, but what I am after is a 
wife." 

Everybody knows — everybody, that 
is, except Mona Caird — that woman is 
not a good hand at an ante-nuptial bar- 
gain. When once she makes up her 

55 



Windfalls of Observation 



mind to jump off the dock with her man, 
she doesn't care to take soundings. It 
is sink or swim then, and the deeper 
the better. Marriage is the bargain the 
law makes for her. It may be a faulty 
one, but it is incalculably better than she 
would make if left to herself. Perhaps 
she may grow warier as the eons accum- 
late. Who can tell ? 
Divorce. Meanwhile, contemporary marriage is 

a bourne from which travellers return 
with an audacity that many persons re- 
gard as not a little scandalous. Critics 
of divorce and divorced persons, how- 
ever, show an increasing disposition to 
cleave to the general in their censure, 
and avoid the particular. Easy or frivo- 
lous divorce is condemned and deplored, 
but the easily divorced are not excluded 
from the politest society, nor do they 
seem to find much difficulty about remat- 
ing with people who are understood to 
put a high value on their respectability. 
There seems to be no particular use 
in squeezing the divorce laws up any 
tighter, unless public opinion will back 
up the squeeze. It isn't law that con- 

56 



Marriage and Divorce 



trols the actions of the average citizen 
so much as the opinion of that citizen's 
fellows. There is much in contempo- 
rary experience that favors the belief 
that if divorce were more difficult, a 
good many people who were excep- 
tionally addicted to each other's com- 
pany, but could not legally marry, would 
live together without marriage if society 
were complaisant enough to condone it. 
It is easier still to believe that neither 
statute nor public opinion will keep peo- 
ple together who really want to sepa- 
rate. The surest hope for the survival 
of the marriage relation is based upon 
the conviction of intelligent people that 
continuous marriages are the best, and 
that divorce at best is a confession that 
the judgment has been mistaken in a 
vital matter, or that affections that were 
formally warranted to hold have fetched 
loose. However easy the laws may be- 
come, or whatever complaisance polite 
society may achieve, divorce, with all its 
privileges and possibilities, must con- 
tinue to be a second-rate bliss by no 
means comparable to true marriage. 

57 



Windfalls of Observation 



special 



One innovation, however, might rea- 
sonably be introduced. It must be ap- 
marriage parent to anvonc who will take the 

laivs/or '■ 

players. troublc to read a column of current dra- 
matic gossip in any newspaper, that 
there ought to be a special marriage law 
for players. While some persons of the 
histrionic profession stay married a good 
while, there is no denying that the aver- 
age of domestic infelicity in that pro- 
fession is exceedingly high, and that an 
exorbitantly large number of married 
actors and actresses make application 
first or last to be unmarried. One can't 
go to a play without realizing that this 
tendency toward a variegated domestic- 
ity is a natural outgrowth of play-act- 
ing. Our minds, it is true, control our 
actions, but our actions, conversely, have 
a reflex influence on our minds, and a 
gentleman who conscientiously comports 
himself on the stage as the husband or 
lover of successive charming ladies, is not 
to be over-much blamed if matrimonial 
change becomes a second nature to him, 
and he flits from flower to flower in real 
life as he does in his profession. 

58 



Marriage and Divorce 



It seems odd enough, sometimes, that 
players should marry at all ; but it will 
be remembered that marriages wind up 
every play, and the actor's professional 
experience strengthens rather than di- 
minishes his prejudice in favor of a con- 
ventional ceremony with a priest and a 
ring. It is the artist that marries, not 
the man ; but the artist and the man 
being inseparable in the law's eye, the 
man is held bound by the artist's action, 
and has to go to trouble and expense, 
and sometimes wait long and make dis- 
tant journeys, before he can go free. It 
doesn't seem quite right that it should 
be that way. If a man has the artistic 
temperament, and the public encourages 
him to cultivate it by going to see him 
act, it seems mean and unreasonable to 
subject him to the same sort of matrimo- 
nial legislation as if he had had the do- 
mestic temperament to begin with, and 
had never been encouraged to do any- 
thing .to break it up. Something ought 
to be done about it, but the State leg- 
islatures have adjourned again without 
doing it. 

59 



Windfalls of Observation 



Polygamy ^^ ^^ ^^^ sooYi yet, but if cvcr it is set- 
as^arem- ^Icd that marriage as it is won't do, and 
that something must be done about it, 
some strong and persuasive arguments 
may be made in favor of a reinstatement 
of polygamy. The basis of the contem- 
porary matrimonial decline, as most 
writers interpret it, is man. Man cannot 
very well be left out of marriage alto- 
gether without defeating some of its 
more important ends and impairing its 
results. But he can be modified and 
etherealized, and of course there would 
be less of him in a plural marriage than 
in a dual one. We are told that " in 
woman's discovery of her ability to be 
independent, self-supporting, and self- 
sufficing, and in her wish to work for 
humanity, and not for one man, her de- 
sire for marriage has lessened." It is a 
pity that her independence should be 
interfered with, or that it should only 
be fostered at the cost of her family life. 
Of course, if she marries a whole man, 
she may have to be devoted to him un- 
comfortably ; but she might take a half 
or a third interest in a man without in- 
60 



Marriage and Divorce 



terfering too much with her higher 
aspirations. 

Such polygamy as is here suggested is 
by no means the same sort of institution 
as the patriarchs experienced or as the 
Mormons have lately repudiated, since 
its design would be, not to increase 
man's importance, but to abate it. To 
secure this result it would probably be 
necessary to reserve to women the initia- 
tive in courtship, and the power of nom- 
inating new candidates for the family 
circle, the husband to have a veto power, 
perhaps, if that should seem desirable. 
Some interesting consequences might 
unquestionably spring from such an ar- 
rangement. Sisters who were co-heir- 
esses might unite upon a single husband, 
thereby keeping the undivided estate in 
the family. Dear girl friends might ab- 
solutely refuse to be separated, and de- 
cline to marry any man who had not 
room in his heart and his house for both. 
So wives who might form close attach- 
ments for other women after marriage, 
could invite their inseparables to share 
their roof and their husband. This pro- 
6i 



Windfalls of Observation 



posed dispensation, too, would operate 
as a form of co-operation to put within 
reach of women who are moderately well 
to do, luxuries which at present are only 
to be had by the very rich. In this 
way several American ladies, by lumping 
their resources, might make such a show- 
ing as to win a British duke or a German 
or Italian prince of a grade such as no 
one of them could pretend to by herself. 
Often it happens that a man loves sev- 
eral marriageable women, and the story- 
tellers even say that several feminine 
hearts have been known to soften con- 
temporaneously toward the same man. 
Under an amended marriage law they 
£Ould all marry him, and all the wear and 
tear of making a choice and the anguish 
of blighted affections be avoided. Nor 
would it be the least advantage of a 
wisely planned polygamy that it would so 
change the conditions of courtship that 
ninety-nine-hundredths of the existing 
mass of fiction would become obsolete, 
and leave the field open to a brand-new 
set of novels with fresh plots. 

There may be therapeutic value in a 
62 



Marriage and Divorce 



well-devised polygamy. When dual mar- 
riage has been abolished, it might be 
tried before humanity despairs and re- 
solves to die out. 



63 



V 

COLLEGE 



COLLEGE 




ELCOME, Mr. New College 
Graduate, into the world. 
It is true of the world, as 
the " Complete Angler " sug- 
gested of the strawberry, 
that God may have made a better one, 
but not for our immediate use, for he 
hasn't put us in it. The world is a 
good enough place if you play fair and culture vs. 
pay attention to the rules. Money is a '^^^u'^^tion. 
handy thing in it, but Mr. Carnegie has 
been saying that you are spoilt already 
for money-making on a very large scale. 
He doesn't think your chance of making 
an eminent business man is as good as 
it might be if you already had three or 
four years of shop-boy experience to 
start with. 

Mr. Pardridge, the Chicago plunger 
who once made a million dollars in a 

67 



Windfalls of Observation 



single day, seems somewhat of Mr. Car- 
negie's opinion, since he has been quoted 
as observing that a man's financial suc- 
cess is not always dependent on his 
education. What Mr. Pardridge calls 
" education " is more accurately ex- 
pressed by the word *' culture ; " for of 
course a man has got to have education 
of a very definite quality before he can 
hope to find any profit in balancing him- 
self on the edge of the Chicago wheat- 
pit. Education is trained development ; 
and the country-store boy whose mind 
runs on trading, and who makes gradual 
progress from peddling mouse-traps to 
swapping railroads, gets education that 
is quite as distinct, though probably not 
as broad, as if he were in special train- 
ing to become a college president. The 
thing he usually doesn't get is culture ; 
and Mr. Pardridge is probably right in 
thinking that the sort of education that 
gives culture is a factor of no particular 
importance in most processes of money^ 
making. 

But his remark in its inverted form is 
just as true and just as important, to 
68 



College 

wit, that the sort of education that' 
merely results in money-making is of no 
particular importance in the promotion 
of culture. A man may get ever so 
much culture and never get rich ; and a 
man may get ever so rich and never 
achieve culture enough to speak polite 
English, or know good poetry from bad. 
Now, a money-maker who has no cult- 
ure is liable to be hard put to it to get 
his money's worth out of life ; and the 
upshot of his embarrassments usually is, 
that not being fitted by education to en- 
joy the things that give pleasure to cul- 
tivated minds, he either takes up with 
less innocent amusements, or else sticks 
to business because it is the only thing he 
likes to do. At best he divides his time 
between money-making and the cultiva- 
tion and enjoyment of that wonderfully 
remunerative animal, the horse. When 
the money has been made in a business of 
large speculative possibilities, there are 
disadvantages about going on, merely 
for amusement, after one has won 
enough. Many men could speak elo- 
quently of the disadvantages of being 

69 



Windfalls of Observation 



Cotnpensat- 
ing advan- 
tages of ed- 
ucation. 



driven by defective culture to buy and 
sell wheat for occupation. 

And yet it is very awkward, too, to be 
very long of culture and very short of 
money. Culture does not make g^rind- 
ing poverty easier to bear, but rather 
the reverse ; for though it is true that 
people of the highest culture can be 
happy on moderate incomes, it is also 
true that cultivated tastes mean culti- 
vated wants, and an income on which an 
uncultured person could live happily 
might be below the minimum indispen- 
sable to the comfort of another person 
whose carefully cultivated wants had be- 
come necessities. 

And that is why I am glad that even 
as money-makers there is some hope for 
you new graduates. Suppose it is true, 
as Mr. Carnegie avers, that you are spoilt 
already for making great fortunes. A 
lot of you who are to be doctors and 
lawyers and editors, and possibly minis- 
ters, his disparagements do not affect at 
all, since you don't expect to make great 
fortunes anyway, and for the rest of 
you who are going into business, there is 



College 

certainly this for consolation, that even 
if the sort of education you have got 
has lessened your chances of becoming 
millionaires, it has certainly improved 
your chances of making a reasonable 
living. It will surprise no one ten or 
fifteen years from now to find you earn- 
ing from two to ten thousand a year, 
but if the century goes out and leaves 
you driving a street-car in New Orleans, 
or waiting on table in a San Francisco 
restaurant, it will be thought remarkable 
enough to warrant extended notices in 
half the newspapers in the United States. 
You see the great majority of college 
graduates eventually make a fair living, 
and people are so much in the habit of 
expecting that they will, that if they do 
not it makes talk. 

Even though you might have been 
richer if you had never gone to college, 
your chance of having fun is better as it 
is. A bachelor of arts who cannot have 
a better time on five thousand a year 
than an average self-made millionaire 
can have on fifty thousand, has misused 
his time. 

71 



Windfalls of Observation 



One point in particular where you 
ought to beat the self-made rich, is in 
the ability you should have already ac- 
quired to command playmates. You 
probably start out with a much better 
assortment of pals than the average 
nascent millionaire had at your age, and 
your chance of affiliating with congenial 
companions all your life through is bet- 
ter than his ever was. That is one 
thing that college should have done for 
you, and another is that it should have 
helped you to make companions of 
books. 

Pleasant people are the pleasantest 
thing in the world, and pleasant books 
are the next pleasantest. Both of these 
you ought to have learned already to 
choose and enjoy, and if you have, 
don't doubt but that your time has 
been well spent. Professor Everett 
used to say fifteen years ago — "When 
Horace says * beatus ' he doesn't mean 
* happy,' he means 'rich.* Translate 
it *rich.'" We confuse "rich" and 
"happy " in these days too, but they are 
not yet quite the same thing. 
72 



College 

It is a good while since any business 
man has recorded his opinion of the wekthel^T 
value of a college education so clearly '^'^^'' 
and so impressively as was done by the 
late Mr. Fayerweather, the leather mer- 
chant, in his will. Mr. Fayerweather 
was an excellent man of business. He 
began to earn money very early in life — 
not from choice, but because he had to. 
When other lads of his age were at 
school he was peddling commodities in 
country villages, and during the years 
which luckier youths spend in college, he 
was acquainting himself with the rudi- 
ments of the leather business. About 
the time his college-going contempo- 
raries were beginning their junior year, 
he got a place in " The Swamp," and in 
" The Swamp " he continued for the rest 
of his days. 

Men live a long time in " The Swamp." 
The smell of hides is not altogether 
pleasing, but it is understood to be 
wholesome, and it makes for longevity. 
But Mr. Fayerweather did not dally with 
hides for his health. He went to " The 
Swamp " to make money. And he did 

73 



Windfalls of Observation 



make money. He was sagacious and 
prudent, and worked hard. Moreover 
he knew all about leather, and leather 
interested him. He kept his mind on it. 
When he laid awake nights he did not 
meditate as to how Julius Caesar built 
bridges in Gaul or who wrote Homer's 
poetry, nor about the chances of this 
year's football team, nor of any of those 
things that liberally educated minds 
dwell upon. He put in his meditation 
upon leather. Accordingly he prospered 
in the leather business. When there were 
dimes to be made in it he carefully 
garnered those dimes, and when some- 
thing in particular was up, and dollars 
were being distributed, he was present 
and took care that such as were coming 
to him got into no one else's pocket by 
mistake. So presently he was well-to- 
do, and had an income that kept heap- 
ing itself up. Then his aggravations 
began. 

For though he knew well enough how to 
make money, there were dreadful defects 
in his ability to spend it. He dared not 
stop working, for he had never learned 

74 



College 

to loaf, and the more he worked the 
more money he made. He travelled a 
little, but he didn't like it. Neither did 
he care for horse-racing, nor yachting, 
nor Scotch moors, nor old Chinese 
pottery, nor pictures, nor books, nor 
coaching, nor Ward McAllister, nor or- 
chids. He just liked leather, and next 
to selling it he liked to buy it. More- 
over, having had no chance in his youth 
to make friends, he had very few old 
friends, and he was shy of attempting 
any social experiments, because he knew 
that society was miscellaneous in its 
tastes and unlikely to be a comfortable 
field of enterprise for a modest mer- 
chant who was aware that all he knew 
well was leather. His children, if he had 
had any, might have learned to have any 
amount of fun, and to make gratifying 
holes in his surplus, but as luck would 
have it he didn't have any children. 

So, as the old man sat at his desk in 
"The Swamp," and saw his income pil- 
ing up and his thousands running up 
into millions and salting themselves 
down, he determined that, so far as lay 

75 



Windfalls of Observation 



in his power, he would take care that 
what had happened to him should hap- 
pen less frequently in times to come. 
So he carved up his fortune into con- 
venient slices, by will, and distributed it 
around among a dozen or more Ameri- 
can colleges, thereby hoping to make 
education easier for poor boys, and keep 
them out of such a scrape as he had 
gotten into himself. 

Certainly he chose a wise means to 
accomplish the worthy end he had in 
view. That any man who has had fair 
educational chances in his youth will 
ever accumulate in trade as great a for- 
tune as Mr. Fayerweather's, is as un- 
likely as that any college-bred youth 
would ever find difficulty in having fun 
with the income of as large a fortune as 
a Mr. Fayerweather might accumulate. 
So, by his wise bequests he planned to 
diffuse a great remedial agent, which 
works in two ways at once — diminishing 
men's ability to heap up very great for- 
tunes, and greatly increasing their capac- 
ity to get happiness out of small ones. 

The new college-graduate is part of 

76 



College 



the high-class, raw material of the world ; 
and yet, we hope for him that he isn't so 
raw by a good deal as he might be if he 
had not gone to college. The primary 
problem with a lad is to teach him to 
take care of himself. He must present- 
ly be turned loose in the world, and we 
want him, when that time comes, to have 
sense enough to keep clear of pitfalls, 
and to cleave unto that which is sincere- 
ly lucrative. It has been held by high 
authority that, since it is no part of the Don't skut 

^ . \ . . ^ all the bad 

busmess of modern university professors boys out/ 
to spy out the iniquity of bad young 
men, colleges would be reserved for 
studious men about whom their fathers 
and mothers are not anxious. But this 
opinion is not compulsory, and one may 
believe, if he can, that men may make 
their parents anxious and yet be capable 
of use to a college and of profiting by it. 
They can be useful as payers of dues, for 
one thing, and the increased income the 
college derives from them can be spent 
in giving additional advantages to their 
fellows. Their presence is worth some- 
thing, too, as giving their quieter breth- 

77 



IVindfalls of Observation 



ren an opportunity to witness the re- 
puted delights of a gay life, and to real- 
ize their hollowness. There are many 
things a man need never do in after-life 
if he has had the necessary experience of 
them in college ; and many things he 
need never do at all if only he has seen 
them done. Thus, in colleges that per- 
mit the presence of some frivolous char- 
acters, studious young men are enabled 
to get, by observation alone, an ample 
and costly experience of life without be- 
ing subjected to personal sacrifices either 
of time or money. Thus it appears that 
both the funds and the actual didactic 
abilities of a college are increased by let- 
ting in some of those young men as to 
whom their parents are anxious. 

It is worth while, too, to consider the 
young men themselves. Even though 
they are defective in studiousness and 
cause their parents anxiety, should they 
be utterly thrown out for those reasons 
alone ? There is always the chance that 
association with studious lads may be a 
benefit to them, and, certainly, if they 
are prohibited in advance from college it 

78 



College 

is hard to suggest an experiment that 
may properly be tried with them, inas- 
much as home has usually failed already 
with this sort, and they are not yet ripe 
for the gallows. If such young men ac- 
quire sufficient book-learning to pass the 
examinations preliminary to getting into 
a good college, and are willing to make 
a sufficient sacrifice of their personal in- 
clinations to do the work which is indis- 
pensable to their continuance there, it is 
easily possible that they come as near to 
being in the right place as their per- 
verted natures will permit. 

It should not be forgotten, either, that 
though the boy is father to the man, the 
man is sometimes a very late crop. 
Some men ripen long after they have 
left college, but they ripen differently 
from having been in college. Nor is it 
invariably the men who have caused 
their parents the least anxiety who 
make the greatest figure in the world or 
show themselves best worth educating. 
General Grant never did much while at 
West Point (nor for long afterward) to 
warrant the expenditure of government 

79 



Windfalls of Observation 



money on his education, but when his 
time finally came, his early training was 
worth more to this country than a brick 
house. Bismarck's time at Gottingen 
seems to have been put in largely in 
duelling and drinking punch with John 
Motley. Nevertheless, he was worth such 
pains as his professors took with him. 

Give the studious youth the best of 
chances, and don't let them be hindered 
or cramped by rules which are only 
needed by roysterers, but don't throw 
the other sort out entirely. Give the 
lad for whom his parents quake a chance, 
too. He has the makings of character in 
him, and though such friendships and 
such education as you can give him may 
not seem like much now, they may make 
a heap of difference to him forty years 
hence. 

A circular that has been sent out to 
Harvard graduates, asking for money to 
put some new athletic fields in order, is 
accompanied by a picture of the new 
grounds as they are going to be. The 
new fields are just about a hundred 
So 



College 

acres roomier than the old (a good deal , 
ot It marsh-land, to be sure), and when i^^^^per- 
they are laid out and planted, and built tfadiorkt 
upon as the picture shows, with ball- 
fields, race-tracks, grand stands, boat- 
houses, and various supplementary tem- 
ples to Hercules and Diana, they will 
bear exceedingly significant testimony to 
the growing disposition in this country, 
at this time, to seek a sound physical 
foundation for the intellectual super- 
structure. The Greeks built that way, 
and for centuries there has been a col- 
lege-bred conviction that the way in 
which the Greeks did things was the 
right way. All the American colleges 
recognize now the educational useful- 
ness of the work that is done with brain 
and muscle in the open air, and provide 
for it as they can. 

It is not to be wondered at if, in the 
last two months of the college year, the 
tendency toward athletics seems almost 
too strong, and the provision for it too 
ample. Then it is that respectable mid- 
dle-aged fogies come out of their holes 
and cry aloud that physical education 
8i 



Windfalls of Observation 

has entirely got the better of the intel- 
lectual department. When spring has 
fairly cleared her throat and found her 
voice, her call is all but irresistible, and 
nothing less than the prospect of an 
indispensable pecuniary settlement on 
Saturday night avails to keep rightly 
constituted individuals indoors. It is 
particularly potent with undergraduates 
and legislators, and from class-rooms and 
State-house halls comes the same moan 
about the difficulty of getting a quorum. 
It is so pleasant at this season to sit on 
a bench in the sun and see good men 
strike at balls and run bases, or to stand 
on a moving platform-car and shriek at 
oarsmen on a river, or even to wave a 
bat or toil at an oar-handle one's-self, 
that the athletic proceedings supplemen- 
tary to education really do get an inor- 
dinate amount of attention. It is nat- 
ural enough that any calamitous-minded 
prophet who contrives to avoid the spell 
of the season, should heap dust on his 
head and reiterate, all through June, that 
the last has become not merely first, but 
the whole procession. 
82 



College 

It is a comfort to be able to assure .y^, 
such protestants that there are figures, " 
veracious and undeniable, which prove, 
in spite of all delusive signs, that the in- 
tellectual end of education was never so 
highly prized as now. Price is not an 
accurate measure of value, but often it is 
the most reliable measure to be had, and, 
at all events, it is good enough for pur- 
poses of comparison. When the price of 
the highest grade of intellectual educa- 
tion goes up because the demand has 
exceeded the supply, it is a pretty sure 
symptom that intellectual education is 
not being neglected. That, in a way, is 
what has happened in the American col- 
leges. Term bills have not increased, 
but college presidents wish they had, 
and that the resulting aggravation of 
income was available to meet the in- 
creasing cost of professors. New uni- 
versities in the West, strong in position 
and in the amplitude of their endow- 
ments, have sent successive emissaries 
eastward, charged to spare no expense 
in procuring the most distinguished 
pedagogical talent that is open to con- 

83 



Windfalls of Observation 



siderations of pecuniary enlargement and 
increased opportunities of usefulness. 
The result is that, nowadays, a high- 
grade base-ball player can be hired for 
less money than a high-grade professor, 
and that some professors are in honor- 
able possession of incomes that actually 
take away one of the immemorial re- 
proaches of the pedagogical profession, 
since they would be considered amply 
remunerative of the services of an ac- 
complished French cook. 

So, whatever may be the feelings of 
the fogies as they read of crowded ball- 
games and boat-races on rivers swarm- 
ing with yachts, for the present at least 
they may as well hold their peace. So 
long as professors are notoriously in de- 
mand at the highest prices ever offered, 
the fogies cannot hope to get anybody 
to believe that the intellectual end of 
education is neglected. 

The tours of the college glee-clubs 
during the holidays, and one or two 
dinners of Yale and Harvard clubs that 
came to my notice, suggested certain re- 

84 



College 

flections as to the proper limit of a gradu- 
ate's devotion to his alma mater. When 
he stands up in evening dress, with a 
glass of champagne in his hand, and 
drinks her health, of course he is excus- 
able if he tints his emotion with enthu- 
siasm, and declares that he is hers and 
that she is his always, and more or less 
exclusively. But how far is this really 
so? and if it is so, is it a laudable or 
desirable fact ? 

College usually puts a stamp on a man whenyou 
which sticks to him all his life long. It f^Z/J^""^ 
shapes his tastes, and usually determines 
in what company he is to begin the seri- 
ous work of living. It starts him. The 
most salient fact about a new graduate 
of Yale, say, or Princeton, who comes to 
New York to work, is that he is " a Yale 
man," or "a Princeton man." 

That is all very well, at the start. It 
identifies him to a certain extent, and 
is useful for descriptive purposes. But 
leave him in the world — New York still, 
perhaps — for ten years. Then, if he is 
still described as "a Yale man of '93," 
without much further detail, I think it is 

85 



Windfalls of Observation 



a fair inference that he has not been 
doing much. The description isn't cred- 
itable any longer. There ought to be 
more to say about him. 

I should confess to a feeling of satis- 
faction if some man whom I had known 
for ten years in the city of Oshkosh, 
where I live, should ask me suddenly, 
"Were you ever in college?" I should 
tell him I had been, and if he asked me 
where, I should tell him that ; and I 
should be better pleased that he should 
be interested enough in me, or in my 
mental processes, to want to know where 
they were trained, than that his first 
thought should be of my college, and 
his after-thought of me. And I think, 
moreover, that I do better by my college 
by putting in the best work I can on my 
own account, than if I proclaimed my 
faith in her methods more loudly, and 
was more effusive in my sympathy with 
others who did not have the advantage 
of her fostering care. Of course, the 
crime of too much concentration upon 
college and college men is the crime 
of the new graduate. But, equally of 
^6 



College 

course, it is something to be got over as 
promptly as may be — something narrow- 
ing, exclusive, and a hinderance to use- 
fulness. 

When you get out of college, young 
man, get clear out. You can get back S^/"*** 
for half a day or so at any time — at a 
boat-race, a foot-ball match, at com- 
mencement — whenever there is a reason- 
able excuse ; but in your daily walk and 
conversation be something more than a 
college man — be a citizen. Be even an 
alderman, if you can. Take the world 
to be yours, as Bacon took all learning 
to be his, and don't forever limit your 
view of it by what was once visible from 
some point in New Haven or in Cam- 
bridge. Go and be a man somewhere. 
Don't be satisfied to be a mere " gradu- 
ate " for all time. Of course you owe 
your alma mater a debt that you are 
always ready to pay, and a loyalty that 
should have no breaks in it. When you 
have grown to the size of Daniel Web- 
ster, and your Dartmouth asks you to 
defend her in court, you are going to be 
proud when you do it. That is all right. 

87 



Windfalls of Observation 



You can't do too much for her, or do it 
too well. If you accumulate any repu- 
tation that is worth having, feel honored 
indeed when she offers to share it with 
you, but don't be too persistently anx- 
ious to strut in her plumes to the dis- 
paragement, it may be, of worthy men 
who have no claim to any similar privi- 
lege. 



88 



VI 

THE TYRANNY OF 
THINGS 




THE TYRANNY OF 
THINGS 

TRAVELLER newly re- 
turned from the Pacific Ocean j^Jf^J^,^. 
tells pleasant stories of the gonia. 
Patagonians. As the steamer 
he was in was passing through 
Magellan's Straits some natives came out 
to her in boats. They wore no clothes 
at all, though there was snow in the air. 
A baby that came along with them made 
some demonstration that displeased its 
mother, who took it by the foot, as The- 
tis took Achilles, and soused it over the 
side of the boat into the cold sea-water. 
When she pulled it in, it lay a moment 
whimpering in the bottom of the boat, 
and then curled up and went to sleep. 
The missionaries there have tried to 
teach the natives to wear clothes, and to 
sleep in huts ; but, so far, the traveller 
says, with very limited success. The 
most shelter a Patagonian can endure is 

91 



Windfalls of Observation 



a little heap of rocks or a log to the wind- 
ward of him ; as for clothes, he despises 
them, and he is indifferent to ornament. 
To many of us, groaning under the 
oppression of modern conveniences, it 
seems lamentably meddlesome to under- 
mine the simplicity of such people, and 
enervate them with the luxuries of civ- 
ilization. To be able to sleep out-of- 
doors, and go naked, and take sea-baths 
on wintry days with impunity, would 
seem a most alluring emancipation. No 
rent to pay, no tailor, no plumber, no 
newspaper to be read on pain of getting 
behind the times ; no regularity in any- 
thing, not even meals ; nothing to do 
except to find food, and no expense for 
undertakers or physicians, even if we 
fail ; what a fine, untrammelled life it 
would be ! It takes occasional contact 
with such people as the Patagonians to 
keep us in mind that civilization is the 
mere cultivation of our wants, and that 
the higher it is the more our necessi- 
ties are multiplied, until, if we are rich 
enough, we get enervated by luxury, and 
the young men come in and carry us out 

92 



The Tyranny of Things 



We want so many, many things, it 
seems a pity that those simple Patago- 
nians could not send missionaries to us 
to show us how to do without. The com- com/orts. 
forts of life, at the rate they are increas- 
ing, bid fair to bury us soon, as Tarpeia 
was buried under the shields of her friends 
the Sabines. Mr. Hamerton, in speaking 
of the increase of comfort in England, 
groans at the " trying strain of expense 
to which our extremely high standard of 
living subjects all except the rich." It 
makes each individual of us very costly 
to keep, and constantly tempts people to 
concentrate on the maintenance of few- 
er individuals means that would in sim- 
pler times be divided among many. " My 
grandfather," said a modern the other 
day, " left $200,000. He was considered 
a rich man in those days ; but, dear me ! 
he supported four or five families — all 
his needy relations and all my grand- 
mother's." Think of an income of $10,- 
000 a year being equal to such a strain, 
and providing suitably for a rich man's 
large family in the bargain ! It wouldn't 
go so far now, and yet most of the 

93 



Windfalls of Observation 



Bad fix of 
a hospital. 



reasonable necessaries of life cost less 
to-day than they did two generations 
ago. The difference is that we need 
so very many comforts that were not 
invented in our grandfather's time. 

There is a hospital, in a city large 
enough to keep a large hospital busy, 
that is in straits for money. Its income 
from contributions last year was larger 
by nearly a third than its income ten 
years ago, but its expenses were nearly 
double its income. There were some 
satisfactory reasons for the discrepancy 
— the city had grown, the number of 
patients had increased, extraordinary re- 
pairs had been made — but at the bottom 
a very large expenditure seemed to be 
due to the struggle of the managers 
to keep the institution up to modern 
standards. The patients are better cared 
for than they used to be ; the nurses are 
better taught and more skilful ; " con- 
veniences " have been greatly multiplied; 
the heating and cooking and laundry 
work is all done in the best manner 
with the most approved apparatus ; the 
plumbing is as safe as sanitary engineer- 

94 



The Tyranny of Things 



ing can make it ; the appliances for anti- 
septic surgery are fit for a fight for life ; 
there are detached buildings for con- 
tagious diseases, and an out-patient de- 
partment, and the whole concern is ad- 
ministered with wisdom and economy. 
There is only one distressing circum- 
stance about this excellent charity, and 
that is that its expenses exceed its in- 
come. And yet its managers have not 
been extravagant : they have only done 
what the enlightened experience of the 
day has considered to be necessary. If 
the hospital has to shut down and the 
patients must be turned out, at least the 
receiver will find a well-appointed in- 
stitution of which the managers have no 
reason to be ashamed. 

The trouble seems to be with very 
many of us, in contemporary private life 
as well as in institutions, that the en- 
lightened experience of the day invents 
more necessaries than we can get the 
money to pay for. Our opulent friends 
are constantly demonstrating to us by 
example how indispensably convenient 
the modern necessaries are, and we keep 

95 



Windfalls of Observation 



having them until we either exceed our 
incomes or miss the higher concerns of 
life in the effort to maintain a complete 
outfit of its creature comforts. 

And the saddest part of all is that it 
is in such great measure an American 
development. We Americans keep in- 
venting new necessaries, and the people 
of the effete monarchies gradually adopt 
such of them as they can afford. When 
we go abroad we growl about the incon- 
veniences of European life — the absence 
of gas in bedrooms, the scarcity and 
sluggishness of elevators, the primitive 
nature of the plumbing, and a long list of 
other things without which life seems to 
press unreasonably upon our endurance. 
Nevertheless, if the res angustce domi get 
straiter than usual, we are always liable 
to send our families across the water to 
spend a season in the practice of economy 
in some land where it costs less to live. 

Of course it all belongs to Progress, 
and no one is quite willing to have it 
stop, but it does a comfortable sufferer 
good to get his head out of his con- 
veniences sometimes and complain. 

96 



The Tyranny of Things 



There was a story in the newspapers 
the other day about a Massachusetts 
minister who resigned his charge be- 
cause someone had given his parish a 
fine house, and his parishioners wanted 
him to live in it. His salary was too 
small, he said, to admit of his living in a tZ^^'oho 
big house, and he would not do it. He fj**''^^/" 
was even deaf to the proposal that he 
should share the proposed tenement 
with the sewing societies and clubs of 
his church, and when the matter came to 
a serious issue, he relinquished his 
charge and sought a new field of useful- 
ness. The situation was an amusing in- 
stance of the embarrassment of riches. 
Let no one to whom restricted quarters 
may have grown irksome, and who cov- 
ets larger dimensions of shelter, be too 
hasty in deciding that the minister was 
wrong. Did you ever see the house that 
Hawthorne lived in at Lenox ? Did you 
ever see Emerson's house at Concord ? 
They are good houses for Americans to 
know and remember. They permitted 
thought. 

A big house is one of the greediest 
97 



Windfalls of Observation 



cormorants which can light upon a little 
income. Backs may go threadbare and 
stomachs may worry along on indiffer- 
ent filling, but a house will have things, 
though its occupants go without. It is 
rarely complete, and constantly tempts 
the imagination to flights in brick and 
dreams in lath and plaster. It develops 
annual thirsts for paint and wall-paper, 
at least, if not for marble and wood-carv- 
ing. The plumbing in it must be kept 
in order on pain of death. Whatever 
price is put on coal, it has to be heated 
in winter ; and if it is rural or suburban, 
the grass about it must be cut even 
though funerals in the family have to be 
put off for the mowing. If the tenants 
are not rich enough to hire people to 
keep their house clean, they must do it 
themselves, for there is no excuse that 
will pass among housekeepers for a dirty 
house. The master of a house too big 
for him may expect to spend the leisure 
which might be made intellectually or 
spiritually profitable, in acquiring and 
putting into practice fag ends of the 
arts of the plumber, the bellhanger, the 

98 



The Tyranny of Things 



locksmith, the gasfitter, and the carpen- 
ter. Presently he will know how to do 
everything that can be done in the 
house, except enjoy himself. He will 
learn about taxes, too, and water-rates, 
and how such abominations as sewers or 
new pavements are always liable to ac- 
crue at his expense. As for the mis- 
tress, she will be a slave to carpets and 
curtains, wall-paper, painters, and women 
who come in by the day to clean. She 
will be lucky if she gets a chance to say 
her prayers, and thrice and four times 
happy when she can read a book or visit 
with her friends. To live in a big house 
may be a luxury, provided that one has 
a full set of money and an enthusias- 
tic housekeeper in one's family ; but to 
scrimp in a big house is a miserable 
business. Yet such is human folly, that 
for a man to refuse to live in a house 
because it is too big for him, is such an 
exceptional exhibition of sense that it 
becomes the favorite paragraph of a day 
in the newspapers. 

An ideal of earthly comfort, so com- 
mon that every reader must have seen 

99 



L.GfC. 



Windfalls of Observation 



it, is to get a house so big that it is bur- 
densome to maintain, and fill it up so full 
of jimcracks that it is a constant occupa- 
tion to keep it in order. Then, when 
the expense of living in it is so great 
that you can't afford to go away and 
rest from the burden of it, the situation 
is complete and boarding - houses and 
cemeteries begin to yawn for you. How 
many Americans, do you suppose, out 
of the droves that flock annually to Eu- 
rope, are running away from oppressive 
houses ? 

When nature undertakes to provide 
a house, it fits the occupant. Animals 
which build by instinct build only what 
they need, but man's building instinct, if 
it gets a chance to spread itself at all, is 
boundless, just as all his instincts are. 
For it is man's peculiarity that nature 
has filled him with impulses to do things, 
and left it to his discretion when to 
stop. She never tells him when he has 
finished. And perhaps we ought not to 
be surprised that in so many cases it 
happens that he doesn't know, but just 
goes ahead as long as the materials last. 

100 



The Tyranny of Things 



If another man tries to oppress him, 
he understands that and is ready to 
fight to death and sacrifice all he has, 
rather than summit ; but the tyranny of 
things is so subtle, so gradual in its 
approach, and comes so masked with 
seeming benefits, that it has him hope- 
lessly bound before he suspects his fet- 
ters. He says from day to day, " I will 
add thus to my house ; " " I will have 
one or two more horses ; " "I will make 
a little greenhouse in my garden ; " "I 
will allow myself the luxury of another 
hired man ; " and so he goes on having 
things and imagining that he is richer 
for them. Presently he begins to real- 
ize that it is the things that own him. 
He has piled them up on his shoulders, 
and there they sit like Sindbad's Old Man 
and drive him ; and it becomes a daily 
question whether he can keep his trem- 
bling legs or not. 

All of which is not meant to prove 
that property has no real value, or to 
rebut Charles Lamb's scornful denial 
that enough is as good as a feast. It 
is not meant to apply to the rich, who 

lOI 



Windfalls of Observation 



can have things comfortably, if they are 
philosophical ; but to us poor, who have 
constant need to remind ourselves that 
where the verbs to have and to be cannot 
both be completely inflected, the verb to 
be is the one that best repays concen- 
tration. 
Lefs blame Perhaps we would not be so prone to 
tk trick I swamp ourselves with luxuries and. vain 
possessions that we cannot afford, if it 
were not for our deep-lying propensity 
to associate with people who are better 
off than we are. It is usually the sight 
of their appliances that upsets our little 
stock of sense, and lures us into an im- 
provident competition. 

There is a proverb of Solomon's which 
prophesies financial wreck or ultimate 
misfortune of some sort to people who 
make gifts to the rich. Though not 
expressly stated, it is somehow implied 
that the proverb is intended not as a 
warning to the rich themselves, who 
may doubtless exchange presents with 
impunity, but for persons whose incomes 
rank somewhere between " moderate cir- 
cumstances " and destitution. That such 

IQ2 



The Tyranny of Things 



persons should need to be warned not 
to spend their substance on the rich 
seems odd, but when Solomon was bus- 
ied with precept he could usually be 
trusted not to waste either words or 
wisdom. Poor people are constantly 
spending themselves upon the rich, not 
only because they like them, but often 
from an instinctive conviction that such 
expenditure is well invested. I wonder 
sometimes whether this is true. conveVien?', 

To associate with the rich seems pleas- '*"-*'^*"'^' 
ant and profitable. They are apt to be 
agreeable and well informed, and it is 
good to play with them and enjoy the 
usufruct of all their pleasant apparatus ; 
but, of course, you can neither hope nor 
wish to get anything for nothing. Of 
the cost of the practice, the expenditure 
of time still seems to be the item that is 
most serious. It takes a great deal of 
time to cultivate the rich successfully. 
If they are working people their time is 
so much more valuable than yours, that 
when you visit with them it is apt to be 
your time that is sacrificed. If they 
are not working people it is worse yet. 
103 



Windfalls of Observation 



Their special outings, when they want 
your company, always come when you 
cannot get away from work except at 
some great sacrifice, which, under the 
stress of temptation, you are too apt to 
make. Their pleasuring is on so large 
a scale that you cannot make it fit 
your times or necessities. You can't go 
yachting for half a day, nor will fifty 
dollars take you far on the way to shoot 
big game in Manitoba. You simply can- 
not play with them when they play, be- 
cause you cannot reack j and when they 
work you cannot play with them, be- 
cause their time then is worth so much 
a minute that you cannot bear to waste 
it. And you cannot play with them 
when you are working yourself and they 
are inactively at leisure, because, cheap 
as your time is, you can't spare it. 

Charming and likeable as they are, 
i/toug/i and good to know, it must be admitted 

pleasant. ° . ' . 

that there is a superior convenience 
about associating most of the time with 
people who want to do about what we 
want to do at about the same time, and 
whose abilities to do what they wish 
104 



The Tyranny of Things 



approximate to ours. It is not so much 
a matter of persons as of times and 
means. You cannot make your oppor- 
tunities concur with the opportunities 
of people whose incomes are ten times 
greater than yours. When you play 
together it is at a sacrifice, and one 
which you have to make. Solomon was 
right. To associate with very rich peo- 
ple involves sacrifices. You cannot even 
be rich yourself without expense, and 
you may just as well give over trying. 
Count it, then, among the costs of a con- 
siderable income that in enlarging the 
range of your sports it inevitably con- 
tracts the circle of those who will find it 
profitable to share them. 



105 



VII 

WILLS AND HEIRS 




contrasted. 



WILLS AND HEIRS 

N the same month, not long 
ago, the wills of two very- 
rich men who died in New 
York were made public. One 
. testator left a widow and sev- 
eral children. The other was childless, 
but his wife survived him. The former 
left the whole of his estate, with the ex- tivo wHU 
ception of some unimportant legacies, to 
his wife and children. The other, after 
providing for his wife an income suffi- 
cient for her maintenance in reasonable 
comfort during her life, left very large 
bequests to colleges and hospitals. His 
heirs-at-law were remembered with mod- 
est legacies, and his executors named as 
residuary legatees. These two wills be- 
ing probated about the same time, and 
disposing of estates believed to be of 
approximately equal amount, were much 
compared and contrasted, and became 
109 



Windfalls of Observation 



the subject of amusing criticism. The 
testator who left money to the colleges 
was lauded and held up as a man of splen- 
did generosity ; while the fact that the 
other departing millionaire left nothing 
to charity was put down in evidence of 
his selfishness. 

Now, it is a very good plan for very 
rich men to leave bequests to charitable 
uses. But the fact that a man leaves a 
great fortune to charity by will is no 
proof at all that he was a generous man. 
He doesn't give his own money, he gives 
money that was his — that, perhaps, he 
held on to as long as he could, and that 
necessarily found a new owner as soon 
as the breath passed out of his body. It 
is impossible to be generous by will. A 
will does not give, it only regulates a 
division. A will may be cited in evidence 
of the testator's affection, or of his sense 
of justice, or of his good sense, but not of 
his generosity — unless, indeed, he is 
known to have denied himself and saved 
and accumulated money, not because he 
wanted it for himself, but for the sake 
of those who would have it after him. 
no 



IVills and Heirs 



Of those two wills, the one that, on the 
face of it, might readily excite criticism 
is the one that contains the bequests to 
the colleges and hospitals. That will 
might convey the impression of a lack of 
cordial relations between the testator and 
his family, or that he was a man who did 
not want his widow or his legal heirs to 
have anything more than they absolutely 
needed. Of course, such an impression 
might do the testator great injustice ; 
but we are not considering facts, only ap- 
pearances. As for the other will, it was, 
in appearance, the will of a man who 
loved and respected his wife and his 
children. Practically it was such a will 
as the law makes for men who die in- 
testate, and it may be presumed that 
such a will accords pretty closely with 
public sentiment. 

It has been remarked that the name of 
the man who remembered the colleges 
will live long after that of the man 
whose children get his money. But 
that, too, is a hasty conclusion, and one 
that it is adverse to public policy to con- 
cede. For, first, it were a poor compli- 
m 



Windfalls of Observation 



ment to pay any man to say that the 
money he left in the world was of more 
value to it than the children he left ; his 
money is something apart from him, but 
his children are part of himself. And, 
moreover, that a man is better employed 
in building up a fortune than in raising 
•sons and daughters, is what many Amer- 
icans seem to think ; but the very fact 
that they think so, and act upon that opin- 
ion, seems to a good many philosophers 
a reason to fear for the future of the 
American people. The childless man 
who endows colleges does well, and we 
do well to praise him. But we cannot 
afford to let such praise go the length of 
disparaging the example of a man who 
raises and endows a family. For that 
husbands should honor their wives, and 
fathers should take thought for their 
children, are conditions necessarily prec- 
edent to the preservation of those 
"family stocks" that President Eliot 
tells us are of such importance to the 
republic. 

And, apropos of wills, it has happened 
to me, within a year or two, to look on 

112 



IVills and Heirs 



at the partition of several considerable 
estates, and to observe in a general way 
what the heirs seemed to be doing with 
their money. They were an assorted 
lot of heirs, with such differences in 
tastes as people usually have, and I have 
been surprised at the similarity in their 
methods of primary expenditure. A 
reasonable outbreak in clothes was one 
of the early symptoms of those that R"uitsof 
came under my notice ; followed in sev- ^'^^^ <>/ 

1 1 • -1 heirs. 

eral cases by mvestments m horses, car- 
riages, and hired men, in houses and 
domiciliary improvements, and less im- 
mediately by the purchase of increased 
leisure. Following the leisure came 
travel. Out of a score or so of these 
new heirs not less than a dozen reported 
in the early spring, without any general 
previous understanding, at an expensive 
and delightful watering-place in Florida. 
They have since gone to Europe with 
a unanimity which brought to some 
of them the embarrassment of finding 
themselves on the same steamer with 
co-heirs with whom those exasperating 
differences which are so apt to be inci- 

"3 



Windfalls of Observation 



dent to the distribution of property had 
left them on politely antagonistic terms. 
It is an interesting deduction from 
the behavior of these heirs that if you 
distribute a certain number of millions 
among a certain number of intelligent, 
adult Americans, you can forecast the 
general lines of their expenditure for a 
year or two ahead, and even mark upon 
the map the places at which they may be 
confidently expected to appear within a 
certain time. Of course, your forecast 
will not be verified in all cases, but if 
you are reasonably intelligent about it 
the accordance between what you ex- 
pect and what you observe will be close 
enough to give you a new idea about 
the smallness of the world and the in- 
fluence of circumstances and personal 
example on human action. You will 
find that people newly intrusted with 
about the same amount of money, in 
the same country, at the same time, go 
through for a time about the same set 
of motions. But, of course, they get 
different degrees of enjoyment out of 
them. For any one who can pay can go 
114 



IVills and Heirs 



and do, but the capacity to enjoy is 
strictly personal. That is why, after 
heirs have had their money awhile, and 
tried the amusements that every one is 
bound to try, they cease to fit your 
generalities. They find out presently 
what they like and what they do not 
enjoy, and then their individuality re- 
asserts itself, and they go their several 
ways again, with tastes and purposes 
modified indeed by money, but not oblit- 
erated by it. 



"5 



VIII 
THE TRAVEL HABIT 




THE TRAVEL HABIT 

[OU probably remember who it 
was that called travelling the 
fool's paradise. I do not re- 
call his name at this mo- 
ment, and my books are 
elsewhere ; but he was a man of sense, 
and I am of his opinion. I say / am of 
his opinion, for this is a personal pro- 
test. I dare say no one else feels as I 
do about it, or has the same sense of 
injury. Writing, this eleventh day of 'ZToThav 
April— and begging humbly any future ^^f/f/'^-^ 
reader's pardon for carrying him so far ^ome. 
back toward the inclement spring — I 
ask, Where is the Rogers family, with 
whom it is my habit to dine on Thurs- 
days ? Where are the Robinsons, who 
invited me to dinner the day before I 
went to New York, and were to have 
renewed the invitation when I got back ? 
Where are the Joneses, with whom I dine 
119 



Windfalls of Observation 



on Sundays ? Where are the Browns, 
that have such pleasant girls with such 
attractive Easter hats to visit them after 
Lent ? Where are most of the people 
who are folks, and keep the breath of 
life stirring in this town of Wayback ? 

The Rogerses ! The Rogerses went to 
Florida about the first of February, and 
are now at Fort Monroe on their way 
back. They may be home again by the 
first of May. The Robinsons went to 
Mexico last week with the Fitztoms. 
They gave no bonds to return, and 
won't be back until — until nobody knows 
when. The Joneses have been spending 
the winter in the South of Europe and 
are at Monte Carlo ; and the Browns are 
still in Colorado. What sort of a spring 
it is for me any coherent reader can 
piece out of what he imagines about the 
number of people in Wayback who are 
folkable according to my personal taste. 

And how is it for the summer ? Some 
of the Wayback tramps will be at home 
again then, perhaps — for little spells of 
time. I hope so ; but in the summer I 
like to get away myself for a few days. 
1 20 



The Travel Habit 



But where to ? The whole family of Ire- 
sons — father, mother, aunts, and all six 
of the children — who used to make 
Pittox so lively in August, sail on the 
City of Jericho the first Wednesday in 
June, to be gone until September. The 
Blenkinsops, who had such a good place 
at Sopton for September, have rented it, 
and propose to spend June in Japan and 
August in Norway. Alenson, who used 
to come up for our September tennis, is 
going to the Feejee Islands this year 
instead. He says he wants to go to 
some place that isn't next door, and that 
it takes a little while to reach. The 
Easterlings have hired a moor in Scot- 
land, and the Westons a castle some- 
where — in Spain, I dare say — and New- 
port will know neither of them this 
summer. No one who has a place will 
be in it, and there's no out-of-the-way 
corner of the globe where you won't be 
more liable to run up against your next- 
door neighbor than you would be to find 
him next door. 

For my part I protest against all this 
straggling and globe-trotting. If there 

121 



Windfalls of Observation 



were any limit or end, or any legitimate 
purpose to it, it might be tolerated. 
But there is not. It is simply a return 
to vagrancy and nomadism. The same 
people who are doing all this straggling 
this year will be at it again next year, or 
the year after at the outside. Once the 
habit is formed they never stay at home 
except for so long as suffices for nec- 
essary measures of financial retrieve- 
ment. 

Of course, there is some use in travel. 
It is instructive to have seen the world 
and to know what is in it. It gives the 
means of making comparisons, imparts 
culture, and opens the eyes generally. 
But these contemporary tramps of ours 
have long since passed the stage of 
learning anything. Their notion of 
travel is rest and repairs, and to have 
fun — good things in their way, but by 
this generation inordinately pursued. I 
say they are a frivolous lot — our tramps ; 
that they try to dodge life ; that by 
keeping perpetually on the go they suc- 
ceed in evading the habits of work and 
the natural ties that stay-at-home people 

122 



The Travel Habit 



have to form, and the responsibilities 
that they have to share. 

In conversation two years ago with 
this expostulator, an eminent man of let- 
ters said that he had travelled thor- 
oughly abroad some thirty years ago, 
and got great benefit from it, but had 
not been to Europe since. " My doc- 
tor," he said, " said to me a number of 
years ago, ' You must absolutely stop all 
work and go abroad.' I said to him, 'If 
I quit work can't I stay at home ? ' ' Oh, 
yes,' he said, ' if you can do it. What I 
want is to stop the work. The Euro- 
pean part of it is not essential.' So I 
stayed at home, and hardly made a mark 
with a pen for six months." 

Here was a man who might have gone 
to Europe and didn't. The excuse came 
to him ready-made ; he had the inevi- 
table doctor to put the responsibility 
upon, but he stayed at home. It was 
borne in upon me that his example was 
one that ought to be published as a cor- 
rective to that vagrant spirit of the age 
against which Miss Cobbe filed a passing 
protest when she wrote : " The gadfly 
123 



Windfalls of Observation 



which pursued poor lo seems to have 
stung us all, and we flit about the globe 
restlessly, until it has nearly come to 
pass that everyone who has a home has 
let it to somebody else, and the last 
place to expect to find a man is at 
home." 

One curious exponent of the prevailing 
restlessness is the practice that obtains 
so generally just now among American 
cities of offering bonuses and pecuniary 
special in- induccments to manufacturers to move 
Ipnomadic. ^hcir plant. After a fire that burned 
^^y- down part of a sewing-machine factory 

the other day, the owners received so 
many proposals from aspiring cities that 
wanted to take them in, that they were 
obliged to publish a notice to the effect 
that only a small part of their works had 
been burned, and that they were not 
open to proposals for adoption. Any 
factory or established business employ- 
ing labor can have its choice, nowadays, 
from a long list of cities, new and old, 
any one of which will give it a site for a 
factory, pay the expenses of moving, and 
124 



The Travel Habit 



perhaps contribute substantially toward 
the construction of a new building. 
People who own land, or are engaged in 
business, in cities, realize that it pays 
them to have their cities grow, and they 
are willing to hire desirable inhabitants 
to come to them. They rely upon get- 
ting their money back in the increased 
value of land, or the general increase in 
business. The result is that the migra- 
tory disposition already so pronounced 
in these days is intensified, and it has 
become a familiar thing not merely for 
individuals to move, but for great ag- 
gregations of working-men to shift the 
scene of their activities from one city 
to another, sometimes thousands of 
miles away. 

Time was when where the average man 
found himself living, there he continued 
to live, unless circumstances of excep- 
tional urgency impelled him to change 
his residence. It is different now. 
Transportation has become so cheap, 
and travel so easy, that the ties of lo- 
cality sit very lightly on the average 
American, and the fact that you find 
125 



Windfalls of Observation 



him settled this year in New York or 
Pennsylvania, affords you a very uncer- 
tain basis for expecting to find him 
next year in the same place. When you 
hear of him again, if he hasn't moved to 
Texas, or Tacoma, or Southern Cal- 
ifornia, or Maine, or North Dakota, you 
feel that he must have had some excep- 
tionally good reasons for staying at 
home. Men used to wag their heads 
and croak about the inability of roll- 
ing stones to gather moss. We have 
changed all that. Moss is at a discount, 
and there is a premium upon rolling. 

Of course for families including small 
children, who leave the cities for more 
salubrious parts in summer, and even 
for working-men who spend their sum- 
mer vacation away from home, there is a 
good deal to be said. " Everybody " goes 
cusabie; somcwhcre in the summer, and if they 
can't go on their own hook, a subscrip- 
tion is got up to send them. " Every- 
body " now includes all the city minis- 
ters, the college professors, the wives 
and children of laborious and well-paid 
brain-workers in big towns, and people 
126 



Summer 

traiiel ex- 



the Travel Habit 



generally who can afford it, and whose 
homes do not happen to be so situated 
that they prefer to go away in the win- 
ter. The summer vacation habit with a 
concomitant change of air and abode 
has taken so strong a hold on the lucky 
tenth of the population, that the rest of 
us who either cannot go, or can only 
stay a fortnight when we do go, should 
comfort ourselves in our restricted con- 
dition with any solace that will fit our 
case. 

There are some compensating reflec- 
tions that we are entitled to entertain. 
To get one's mind thrown off the track 
and jolted into new intellectual gaits, 
and one's liver, too ; and to see new 
people in new places and hear them talk 
about new things ; and to be quit of 
the daily grind and free to devote the 
solid part of the day to frivolous uses — 
those are enviable privileges, and the 
best of them is that when they have the 
right effect it stays by you all winter. 
But if you can't go it is certainly but many 
worth remembering how sharp the jolt ^n£sa/er 
often is when the intellectual wheel ''^^^'"''^ 
127 



Windfalls of Observation 



leaves the rail. It is so much easier to do 
to-morrow what you did yesterday than 
every day to face the responsibiUty of 
keeping yourself pacified with novel oc- 
cupations ! Then at home you know 
your own plumber, and can recognize 
the monsters in the drinking-water when 
you see them under a microscope ; but 
when you go away you become the cor- 
pus vile of sanitary experiments to the 
precedent conditions of which you were 
not a party. As an involuntary home- 
dweller you are entitled to meditate on 
all the cases mentioned last autumn in 
the newspapers of persons who lan- 
guished on regretful couches with ty- 
phoid fevers picked up in a summer 
quest after health. And if there was 
any ice-cream poisoning done anywhere 
in a summer resort, you are entitled to 
remember that, as well as any and all of 
the contagious complaints that anybody's 
children brought home with them. 

So, too, as to the moral, intellectual, 
and social hazards, which are really a 
good deal more terrifying than the phys- 
ical ones. If there are rocks in the 
128 



The Travel Habit 



harbor of one's home there are buoys 
over them, or at least you know where 
they are and can steer clear ; but once 
you get away, unless you have a pilot 
for every place, reasonable caution de- 
mands that when you are not absolutely 
at anchor you shall spend the bulk of 
your time up forward heaving the lead. 
There is your husband, madam— such a 
good, tame, domestic creature at home. 
Take his work away from him and turn 
him loose to find himself employments 
and what astonishing things may happen 
to him ! Cocktails ! Those are trifles. 
Kind and devoted husbands lured un- 
willing to the mountain-tops have found 
affi?iities there, and affinities that in some 
cases were the theretofore devoted wives 
of other men. Surely any good man who 
has one wife already would stay at home 
till moss accumulated on his scalp rather 
than go gadding and take the chance of 
running against his affinity. To be 
slaughtered, or partly slaughtered, in a 
railroad accident on the way is bad, but 
nothing like as bad as to arrive safely 
and find your affinity awaiting you. 
129 



Windfalls of Observation 



Wives, too, have found affinities in 
their summer holidays. Others a little 
less unfortunate have developed a dis- 
astrous craving to get into society. 
Others have become dissatisfied with 
their customary raiment and incurred 
aspirations pregnant with pecuniary dis- 
aster. Maidens have broken coins with 
ineligible youths not of their own set ; 
parents' hopes have been blighted by 
the collapse of eligible sons before im- 
possible summer girls. The rector of an 
affluent Episcopal parish was once con- 
verted at Bar Harbor and became a Bap- 
tist, to his severe pecuniary loss and the 
manifold detriment of his family. So, it 
is narrated, a Boston physician became 
infatuated with Christian Science during 
a month's holiday at Narragansett Pier 
and abandoned his practice because of 
conscientious scruples. 

People have stayed at home and lived 
to be a century old. A shorter experi- 
ence than that has qualified careful ob- 
servers to assert that when they have 
been unable to go in search of change a 
little patience has enabled them to en- 
130 



The Travel Habit 



joy it at home. They even say that the 
arrangement known as the seasons has 
been expressly contrived to bring whole- 
some varieties of climate around to the 
doors of folks who wait for them. They 
are old fogies, such people, but there are 
compensations about their way. 



131 



IX 

NEWSPAPERS AND PEO- 
PLE 



L _ 




NEWSPAPERS AND PEO- 
PLE 

HY do people care so much ^^^f^^tt 
about what is said in news- nemsfafers 

say, 

papers ? They do care, es- 
pecially when the something 
said is said of themselves. 
My friend the Judge remarked the other 
day, on what seemed to him the absurd 
fact, that when a young man of ques- 
tionable wisdom made a remark you 
gave it such attention as his abilities 
and the accuracy of his information 
seemed to warrant ; but when the same 
young man got his remark committed to 
type, and put into a newspaper, it be- 
came clothed in an authority which you 
felt bound to respect, and did respect 
more or less, however you might differ 
from the opinion. But the fact was not 
so absurd as the Judge thought. 

When Brown remarks to Jones, " Rob- 

135 



Windfalls of Observation 



inson is an ass," that is one thing. 
Brown may not really mean what he 
says. His remark is intended for Jones, 
and very possibly he counts upon cer- 
tain qualities in Jones to qualify its 
force. Beauty lies in the eye of the be- 
holder, and of course very much of the 
force of talk lies in the listener's ear. 
Then, too, when Brown makes his re- 
mark it may be with recognition of the 
chance that he may feel differently about 
Robinson the next morning, and may 
recall his opinion the next time he and 
Jones meet. But when Brown, the 
editor, composing the opinions of his 
newspaper, has his disparaging opinion 
of Robinson put into type and published, 
that is a different matter. 

In the first place, when the opinion 
once gets into print it becomes some- 
thing more than Brown's opinion. It is 
the opinion of a responsible business es- 
tablishment, which very possibly repre- 
sents an investment of some hundreds 
of thousands of dollars, the profits of 
which depend in a considerable measure 
upon its reputation, which in turn de- 
136 



Newspapers and People 



pends, to some extent, on the ability of 
its editor to say the right thing at the 
right time, and defend it. 

And to anything which a responsible 
newspaper prints attach many of the 
qualities which thus characterize its per- 
sonal remarks. For whatever it says it 
must be ready either to fight, or to apolo- 
gize and pay. Inevitably it will have to 
apologize sometimes ; but the apologies 
of great newspapers are far between, 
and are apt, when they come, to relate 
to matters of minor importance. The 
obligation to be right, or at least de- 
fensible, in the first place, is seriously 
taken, and an apology is a confession. 

In the second place, when an opinion 
about Robinson gets into a newspaper 
it is on the way to become the opinion 
of that newspaper's readers, and from 
that it is only a step to becoming the 
opinion of the public. If the remark is 
so manifestly true, or supported by such 
evidence that the average intelligence 
accepts it, it comes with the force of 
revelation, as did the remark of the 
little boy in the fairy tale that the king 

137 



IVindfalls of Observation 



hadn't his clothes on. From private 
opinion to public opinion is as great a 
step as from a liquid to a crystal ; but 
when matters have come to the right 
point a little jar will often precipitate 
the change in an instant. 

Robinson may bear with equanimity 
the knowledge that Brown in talking 
with Jones has called him an ass, but 
the suspicion that Jones's opinion is 
public opinion may reasonably discon- 
cert him. 

And speaking of the newspapers, and 
what they say, a person whose identity 
it is unnecessary to publish here, but a 
very important person, who was grum- 
bling the other day about those ambi- 
tious paragraphs in the untrammelled 
press which record from December to 
May that Mrs. Thompson Jones had a 
party, and Mr. and Mrs. Brown Robin- 
son and Mr. and Mrs. Rogers Smith 
were there, expressed himself as fatigued 
with the record of these events, and 
with the constant repetition of the same 
names in connection with them. Why 

138 



Newspapers and People 



these names and no others, he wanted 
to know, and argued that the apparent one office o} 
recognition of their worth conveyed in "^^^^j" 
this exclusive notice was one thing that 
lulled these people in the delusion that 
they were "the folks," and made them 
feel above other persons whose move- 
ments gained less notoriety. He wanted 
something done about it. 

This, to tell him that he is fretting 
over something that ought not to dis- 
turb him. When he goes to the theatre 
does he complain because his name and 
yours and mine are not on the play-bill, 
but all the space there is given up to 
identifying a lot of actors who are not a 
bit more worthy as mere men, when it 
comes down to real worth, than we are ? 
Let him take rich society, rich New 
York society for example, from the 
same point of view. The persons whose 
social achievements get so much more 
notice than ours may not be really more 
admirable than we, but they are occupy- 
ing the stage. So far from being vexed 
at them, he ought to regard them from 
afar off with grateful emotions, as per- 

139 



Windfalls of Observation 



sons who are employed to perform social 
feats at their own expense for his diver- 
sion, and whose operations are kindly 
set forth in the public press so that he 
can easily inform himself about them 
when personal observation is not con- 
venient. Not the books in the Astor 
Library, not the pictures in the Metro- 
politan Museum, nor Cleopatra, her nee- 
dle in the Park, are more distinctly ours 
to use and to profit by than these Brown 
Robinsons and Rogers Smiths. When 
their splendor has its setbacks it is for us 
spectators to draw moral lessons there- 
from for our use. When young Thomp- 
son Smith elopes with a ballet-dancer 
we can wag our heads as we read about 
it and be thankful that our sons are not 
exposed to the demoralizing influences 
of large means ; and the same when 
Benita Brown Robinson marries some 
scarecrow prince, or Lawrence Perry 
the Younger's difficulties with the gov- 
ernors of the Union Club are advertised 
to the world. Be sure the recording 
angel takes regular note of the advan- 
tage it is to us to have these rich always 
140 



Newspapers and People 



with us, and that we shall be held to 
strict accountability for all the profit we 
ought to have received from our news- 
paper familiarity with their ingoings and 
outcomings, and all their vicissitudes of 
experience. 

There may even be profit for us in 
the labors of a certain gifted but un- 
scrupulous gossip who writes letters 
from Gotham to a Western newspaper, 
when tattling about New York's eligible 
youths. She writes : 

Lawrence Perry's son, Lawrence, Jr., will in- xke Law 
herit most of his father's wealth and much of his rence 
prestige. Perry, Sr., is, par excellence, the leader ^''^^'• 
of the * ' f ast-and-swagger " set ; he sets *' the pace 
that kills," which the ten-millionaires follow, and 
he nevertheless manages to keep a safe hold on 
his own millions, which Lawrence, Jr., will get in 
good time. He has trained the young fellow to 
walk in his footsteps, to be an exquisite in dress, a 
bird of prey among women, a hard rider, a deep 
drinker, a turfman, a gambler, and withal a keen 
business man, a genial fellow, polished man, and 
a pretty good friend. He will marry, doubtless in 
liis own set, a woman as congenial and gay-tem- 
pered as himself, who will not be jealous, and, as 
long as the outward appearances are observed, will 
drive him with a very light hand and loose rein. 

141 



Windfalls of Observation 



The names in the correspondent's 
paragraph have been changed. Very 
possibly her description of the father 
and son whom she named does them in- 
justice, but the type that is portrayed is 
real. Alas, alas, to how many thousand 
men of Gotham does the life of the 
Lawrence Perrys, father and son^ seem 
the ideal of an existence ! To have 
abundance of money and health, and to 
spend both in " having a good time ; " 
to be a rake and a turfman ; to have 
the habendum and tenendmn clauses of 
one's nature developed to the degree re- 
quired for the successful management of 
" business ; " to be a graduate of Del- 
monico's and an exponent of Poole's ; to 
ride hard ; to drink deep ; to play high ; 
to marry, but on terms of such mutual 
consideration as our gossip suggests. 
What a life to lead, and to lead, not from 
necessity, but to choose as the highest 
good ! A life of glitter and go, but 
shorn of tenderness, of self-denial, of 
any true service to mankind. 

One of the most repulsive characteris- 
tics of a great city is the presence in it 
142 



Newspapers and People 



of the Lawrence Perrys and their influ- 
ence upon the town, especially upon the 
lads thereof. They are so pervasive and 
so noisy that they slop over everything. 
They catch the eye with their glitter. 
Their coaches, and yachts, and palaces 
constantly force themselves on the at- 
tention. It is hard to convince little 
Joe Brown and young Jack Robinson 
that there is anything better in life than 
the Lawrence Perrys have got; and it 
may be hard presently to keep Joe and 

Jack from following after the Perrys 

albeit afar off, as near as their circum- 
stances can be stretched to permit. 

The Lawrence Perrys are not much 
beloved, but they do not incur the full 
measure of the contempt that they de- 
serve. Much of the obloquy that they 
should monopolize is shared by that 
much more numerous and less objection- The society 
able product of contemporary civiliza- ^'^''^'«^'^- 
tion whose misfortune it is to be known 
as '' the society young man." Alas for 
him, there is a haze of ambiguity about 
him which makes his identity obscure 
143 



Windfalls of Observation 



and doubtful. People question his ex- 
istence just as they do the existence of 
the devil, but he must exist, for the 
newspapers are full of his deeds. Un- 
like Fitz Greene Halleck's friend, whom 
none named but to praise, the society 
young man is rarely brought into the 
conversation without being injuriously 
dwelt upon. Whatever he may have 
done is a matter for speculation, but it 
must have been a dreadful thing. He 
has no friends. Everybody hates him 
and evilly entreats him. All the ill-ad- 
vised infants who lack putative fathers 
are attributed to him ; his example is 
held up to Sunday children as a red 
light on the road to perdition ; his life is 
pictured as a conglomeration of patent- 
leather shoes, shirt-front, and opera-hats, 
irrigated with champagne, punctuated 
with cigarettes, and seasoned with a 
deceitful smile. The enthusiasm he 
inspires in his traducers is admirably 
illustrated in some recent statements of 
a certain Reverend Douglas, of Mon- 
treal, who lately observed in the course 
of some disparaging remarks about his 
144 



Newspapers and People 



neighbors : " The society man will lie, 
he will swindle, he will cheat at cards, he 
will forge, he will defalcate, he will smile 
in the face of a man as a friend while 
he is wrecking his domestic honor, and, 
as I have known, he will drink the very- 
wine that charity has donated for his dy- 
ing wife and fill the bottle with water." 

No ordinary villain could have pro- 
voked such reprehension as this. Either 
the society young man is a dangerous 
foe to humanity, who ought to be shut 
up, or else he has been maligned. 

Without desiring to incur the dislike 
of any worthy person by speaking up for 
such an outcast, it is excusable to admit 
one's impression that the society young 
man is not really all Hyde, but has his 
Jekyll side, like the rest of us. He is 
young and frivolous, no doubt, but he 
has good ideas about the use of soap 
and fair prospects of learning other vir- 
tues as his experience increases. The 
censors of public morals ought not to be 
after him too fiercely because he dances 
with the girls. He will have finished 
with that presently. Indeed, he will 

145 



IVindfalls of Observation 



have finished in great measure with 
most of his present amusements, and 
will either be dead or hard at work try- 
ing to support his wife and children. 
Butterfly he is, perhaps, but grub he was 
and grub he will become again before 
you know it. Be kinder to him while he 
lasts, his turn is so very, very brief. 



146 



THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE 




THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE 

N a world where it is very de- 
sirable to be entertained, and Cultivate 
not always easy to find en- teries. 
tertainment, there is a great 
deal to be got out of a dis- 
creet consideration of the mysteries of 
life. They give one something to the- 
orize about in odd moments, and to have 
theories about them gives one an inter- 
est in whole series and classes of facts 
which seem to fit in with such theories 
or to upset them. If the facts won't 
fit the theory, then there is the theory 
to change ; and to have one's theory 
driven into a new shape is the next best 
thing to having it justified. 

If existence is a little poky, and if you 
live in a quiet place and cannot afford to 
own horses enough to completely oc- 
cupy your leisure, or if you are restless 
ashore and too poor to have a yacht, or 
149 



Windfalls of Observation 



if you are the uneasy husband of one 
wife, or the wife of one husband, and 
think it immoral to flirt, it may pay you 
to attach yourself to one of these mys- 
teries. Do it, not necessarily in the ex- 
pectation of solving your problem, but 
for the sake of pure cogitation. It is a 
natural resource of a human being, for 
to puzzle over the mysteries of life leads 
to a reaching out after the great centre 
and solution of all the mysteries, and to 
the establishment of relations in which, 
vague and slender as they are, the mind 
of man finds rest. 

There was a little tale in the news- 
paper the other day about Mr. Edison, 
that he held up his finger and bent it, 
and asked, " What does that ? " Fail- 
ing to get a satisfactory reply, he said 
he was trying to find out what is the 
force that pulls the strings that makes 
animate creatures move. That is one of 
the great mysteries — the mystery of mo- 
tion. It is that, we are told, that Mr. 
Keely, the motor-man, has been brood- 
ing over for several decades past. Mr. 
Keely's experience has not been such as 



The Mysteries of Life 



to encourage any poor man to theorize 
on this subject for a living ; neverthe- 
less, it is a great subject for a mind to 
dwell upon in its leisure moments. Sir 
Isaac was thinking about it when the 
apple fell and gave him an idea that was 
of value to him, and has been useful 
ever since. There is always this advan- 
tage about having one's mind run on 
something in particular, that even if it 
does not bring down what it is aimed at 
it is more likely to hit something else 
that is worth while than if it were wan- 
dering aimlessly. As witness the useful- 
ness of the alchemists to the science of 
chemistry. Even if Mr. Edison's mind 
fails to grasp the force that crooks his 
finger, it is very possible that he may 
puzzle out some minor problem that is 
worth while. Indeed, it is reported al- 
ready that he has a fascinating theory 
that attributes an individual will to 
every atom, and declares that matter is 
sentient. 

Another mystery of captivating quali- 
ties is that which shrouds the relation 



Windfalls of Observation 



The cure 



of the body to the spirit. It was the 
mystery whose partial solution led Dr. 
Henry Jekyll to make the disastrous 
'mystery. acquaintance of Edward Hyde. De- 
scribing his speculations on the duality 
of man and sundry chemical investiga- 
tions that supplemented them, Dr. Jekyll 
writes : " A side-light began to shine 
upon the subject from the laboratory 
table. I began to perceive more deeply 
than it has ever yet been stated the 
trembling immateriality, the mist-like 
transience of this seemingly so solid 
body in which we walk attired. . . . 
I not only recognized my natural body 
for the mere aura and effulgence of cer- 
tain of the powers that made up my 
spirit, but managed to compound a 
drug," etc. 

One division of this mystery embraces 
the subject of cures. Once get on the 
track of that and every newspaper story 
about faith-cure, or any of the varieties 
of mental healing, becomes a thing to be 
weighed, and if it seems to have sub- 
stance, to be held in mind for considera- 
tion and future use. All kinds of " mir- 



152 



The Mysteries of Life 



acles " bear on this mystery. Hypnotism 
and hypnotic cures are intimately mixed 
up with it. Telepathy has to do with 
it ; apparitions, presentiments, and clair- 
voyance are more or less allied to it. 
Doctors, quacks, patent medicines, and 
all sorts of "healers," regular and other- 
wise, bear a relation to it that will come 
constantly under discussion. 

Anyone, for example, who is thorough- 
ly awake on the subject of the cure mys- 
tery, must have read with interest the 
other day that the Board of Health of 
Massachusetts had recommended to the 
Legislature of that commonwealth to 
make a law providing that all persons 
engaged in the healing art in any form, 
except dentistry, shall register within a 
certain time in the office of the clerk of 
the town where they propose to prac- 
tice, describing themselves, and giving, £"^'}f"'^''^' 
under oath, in detail their courses of physicians. 
instruction in medicine and the names 
of their colleges ; false entries to be sub- 
ject to the penalties for perjury, and 
failure to register, to fines or imprison- 
ment. It seems that there are too many 

153 



Windfalls of Observation 



quacks and irregular healers in Massa- 
chusetts, and the regular doctors think 
it time that they were suppressed. 

Without any pretence of faith in any 
doctor who is not regular, without ig- 
noring the sound objections to self-con- 
stituted physicians, and without preju- 
dice to a sincere intention of calling in 
a thoroughly instructed and expert prac- 
titioner whenever occasion demands, it is 
still permissible to smile amiably at the 
professional antipathy to quacks. The 
successful physician, with exceptions 
which happily are much more numer- 
ous than they were, is the most intol- 
erant despot on earth. And we encour- 
age him to be so. We are vaguely aware 
of the limitations of his knowledge ; we 
know that he has to guess first what is 
the matter with us, and next what will 
do us good, and that though there are 
facts his acquaintance with which helps 
him to guess right, many theories that 
regulate his professional action are still 
hypothetical, and may or may not be 
correct. We know that he has dis- 
covered that many of the methods his 

154 



The Mysteries of Life 



father used were unwise and deleterious, 
and that the doses his grandfather gave 
often hastened the result they were in- 
tended to prevent, and hindered what 
they were designed to induce. We know 
not only that he is a man, and therefore 
fallible, but that his professional science, 
like his father's and grandfather's, is 
progressive, and is still very far from 
being exact. Nevertheless, when any- 
thing ails us, in spite of all we know of 
his limitations, we fly to him as though 
he were all-wise, and do as nearly what 
he tells us to as our flesh and our pockets 
permit. For we believe that, erring and 
inadequate as he is, he knows more than 
we do, and that his knowledge is, on the 
whole, the best that is at our command. 
This childlike trust in our physicians 
is a phenomenon which is creditable to 
us and to our doctors, and from which 
we both get benefit. Experto crede is 
sound advice, and ninety- something 
times out of a hundred we take it and 
do well. The other odd times either we 
take it and don't do well, or we take it 
with misgivings, or we don't take it at 

155 



Windfalls of Observation 



all. The world's experience has taught 
that in certain kinds of cases the wisdom 
that has finally justified itself has been 
the wisdom of the unlearned. The babes 
and sucklings of knowledge have hit up- 
on the truth that the doctors have not 
been able to see, because their learning 
has stood in their light. Of course, if a 
thing isn't so, the more reasons a man fc 
has for believing that it must be so, the 
farther he is from the truth, and the less 
chance there is of its percolating into 
him. Thus, when bleeding was the great 
medical cure-all, the worthy physicians 
who knew exactly why it must be the one 
indispensable remedy were really in a 
more hopeless bog of ignorance than 
people who knew nothing about medi- 
cine at all, but simply regulated their 
A weak practice by the light of nature. Every 
specialists, man to his trade is a maxim that we 
habitually respect, in that we don't send 
our horses to a carpenter-shop to be 
shod, nor employ a gardener to look after 
the plumbing. The man whom we ex- 
pect to be conversant with horseshoeing 
as a contemporary art is the blacksmith, 

156 



The Mysteries of Life 



and the person with the requisite skill 
and appliances for dealing with lead 
pipes is the plumber. But if the con- 
temporary art of horseshoeing has a 
radical flaw in it, the carpenter, whose 
mind has not been prejudiced by mis- 
taken instruction nor his natural gump- 
tion perverted by malpractice, may be a 
likelier man to detect it than the black- 
smith. And so the gardener may see 
that the plumber's pipes are unsafe, the 
plumber's argument and usage among 
the best plumbers to the contrary not- 
withstanding. 

And so, ordinarily sagacious people 
come to make instinctive allowance for 
the prejudices of learning, as they do for 
what the unlearned don't know. A valu- 
able pocket of knowledge on some par- 
ticular line of investigation is often ac- 
quired, like ambergris in whales, at the 
cost of a considerable degeneration of 
the rest of the creature. Even so great 
a man as Darwin had to give up such in- 
tellectual valuables as his taste for music 
and his interest in religion in exchange 
for what he learned about deep-sea fishes 

157 



IVindfalls of Observation 



and the habits of earth-worms. Medical 
specialists, especially, come in for a de- 
gree of chastened mistrust, and are in 
danger of being regarded as intellectual 
cripples whose minds, from too incessant 
application to one class of phenomena, 
get a list, as the mariners say, in that 
direction. 

The point of all of which is, that hu- 
manity has a rational ground for appeal 
not only from the medical faculty, but 
from all high intellectual courts. Not 
only does perfect wisdom not lie in even 
the highest learning, but the cultivation 
of microscopic powers of the intellectual 
vision has a recognizable tendency to 
make the cultivator intellectually near- 
sighted. It is a tendency that is tacitly 
recognized day by day when we wonder 
if some person on whose insanity the 
experts have pronounced is really de- 
mented or not ; or if there is really vir- 
tue in a remedy that the doctors say is 
bogus ; or if there really are ghosts after 
all, or miraculous cures, though science 
says there can't be ; or if the doctrine 
of evolution is a mistaken hypothesis, in 

•58 



The Mysteries of Life 



spite of all the wise men who believe 
in it. 

In every-day practice it is wise for us 
to listen deferentially to the men of 
highest learning and to act upon their 
advice, but it is neither necessary nor 
even advisable to let the voice of author- 
ity wholly extinguish our speculations, 
since great practical benefit has come to 
the world in time past from the faith of 
the unlearned, and imaginings which au- 
thority has ridiculed have finally worked 
out into marvellously fruitful results. 

Undoubtedly our physicians do us 
good ; and indeed they ought to, even if 
they knew less and guessed less fortu- 
nately than they do, else were faith a 

11 . , . . Extenuat- 

much less potent virtue than it is de- tngpossibii^ 
clared to be. But it is one thing for us to r'/gu^dJ^"" 
flock of our own accord to the doctors, ^'''^'"^^ 
and quite another thing for those profes- 
sional gentlemen to hold that we shall 
come to them and to none else, and that 
we may neither be legitimately born nor 
die legally, except with their concur- 
rence. If we, being adults and possibly 
voters, want to prescribe for our own 

159 



Windfalls of Observation 



infirmities, or have our neighbors pre- 
scribe for us, or try our luck with patent 
medicines, or have in faith-curers. Chris- 
tian scientists, mind-curers, hypnotizers, 
or the representatives of any other 
school of therapeutic endeavor, does not 
our constitutional right to the pursuit 
of happiness warrant us in such experi- 
ments ? There are many reasons for be- 
lieving that it is wiser to trust a regu- 
larly educated physician than one that 
is irregularly educated or not educated 
at all, and unless the irregulars are in 
at the cure reasonably often they need 
not be much dreaded, for they will not 
get much custom. 

If it relieves us to turn now and then 
from the traditional dangers of the reg- 
ular physician's half-knowledge to the 
confident ignorance of the quack, is it 
quite fair to rule that there shall be no 
quacks for us to turn to ? Every person 
with a new theory is a quack until the 
value of the theory is demonstrated, but 
if all the quacks are arbitrarily sup- 
pressed how are their theories to be 
tested ? It is right enough that the 
1 60 



The Mysteries of Life 



medical profession should be a despot- 
ism, but in the name of much that we 
know and much more that we hope to 
know, let Massachusetts hesitate before 
she forbids it to be a despotism tem- 
pered by quacks. 

One danger on the other side is that 
misplaced confidence in " sure cures " 
or the infallibility of new-found methods 
r lay cause too-credulous people to ignore Butbecare, 
t he dictates of common sense. For fear, ^"^ «^?^«>*- 
for example, that the multiplication of 
patent processes for the extirpation of 
the rum habit may cause unwary indi- 
viduals to suppose that it is no longer 
a strenuously undesirable habit to ac- 
quire, this seems a reasonable place to 
speak a few words on the subject of 
temperance. Temperance lecturers and 
foes of the demon rum have spoken 
exhaustively about the disadvantages 
of inebriety, but not half enough stress 
seems to have been laid hitherto on the 
great inconvenience of being incapacitat- 
ed to enjoy the reasonable pleasures of 
drinking. 

i6i 



Windfalls of Observation 



There is a pretty general agreement 
of the authorities that a man who has 
once thoroughly abused his privileges 
as a wine-drinking animal, never can 
regain them. He can stop drinking 
altogether, but a moderate and whole- 
some use of wine is something which 
he may not safely attempt. If he 
does attempt it, conscientious persons 
will not like to drink with him, for, of 
course, there is no pleasure in sharing 
the cups of a man to whom alcohol, 
meshed in whatever sunshine, is a poi- 
son. A reformed drunkard is a great 
deal better than a drunkard who has not 
reformed, but, beside a man who has 
never needed reforming, he is a second- 
rate thing. One considerable source of 
legitimate gratification he has used up. 
There is a weak spot in him, and he 
must so govern his life as to keep it 
from undue exposure. He is not to 
drink the bride's health at the wedding, 
and even if his long-lost friend whom 
i^ouliesom. he hasn't seen since he left college hap- 
%rm7d. peiis into his office he cannot go out and 
have so much as a cocktail with him. 
162 



The Mysteries of Life 



Of course, cocktails are detestable 
things to drink at all times, and thrice 
and four times detestable in office hours, 
but there are occasions when one's feel- 
ings seem to demand some reasonable 
disarrangement of the insides as an aid to 
expression. Perhaps it is a survival of 
the old habit of sacrifice that prompts a 
normal man to celebrate joyous occa- 
sions by some disturbance of his vital or- 
gans. At any rate, there is no doubt 
about the prompting, nor yet that the 
most feasible and ordinary expression it 
finds is in taking a drink— which is prob- 
ably the foundation for Byron's cele- 
brated aphorism, that 

*' There's naught no doubt so much the spirit calms 
As rum and true religion. " 

It is a pity about the man who cannot 
conscientiously take a cocktail whenever 
a long-lost friend returns. It is a dis- 
comfort to him not to drink the baby's 
health at the christening ; not to raise a 
brimming bumper to the bride at the 
wedding breakfast; not to roll back a 
decade or two when he sits down the 
163 



Windfalls of Observation 



night before commencement with the 
remnant, still considerable, of the band 
who were young when he was. So far as 
this disuse of reasonable daily potations 
goes, the reformed man is no great loser, 
but possibly even a gainer, since the doc- 
tors are coming more and more to the 
opinion that, regarding merely the neces- 
sities of man's health, little or no alcohol 
is plenty enough for him. But with the 
great occasions it is different. There 
are not many of them. Not often at all 
does the conscientious workingman hear 
nunc est bibendum ringing in the familiar 
tones of his still, small voice. 

To reform is indefinitely better than 
to be the creature of a perverted thirst, 
just as amputation is better than to suc- 
cumb to gangrene ; but the amputated 
limb is permanently off, and the unde- 
niable inconvenience of not having it is 
to be added to the pain of amputation, 
as an excellent argument in favor of tak- 
ing good care of it in the first place. 



164 



XI 

MISSING SENSES AND 
NEW ONES 




MISSING SENSES AND 
NEW ONES 

MAN died the other day of 
whom it was told, in all his 
obituary notices, that in his 
physical equipment there was 
this curious defect, that he 
could not hear the sound of S, or of the 
shrill notes. He would be walking in 
the street with a policeman at night tivo senses 
sometimes, and would see the officer go ^^ZnlidnH 
through the motions of blowing a whis- ^"''^'' 
tie. The whole neighborhood might 
echo with the shrill noise, but not a 
sound would reach him. That was bad, 
but it was a mere bagatelle compared 
with another thing that was the matter 
with him. The poor gentleman had the 
intellectual defect of being unable to 
see a joke, even when it took form in 
the newspaper of which he was editor. 
One day one of his reporters, in de- 
X67 



Windfalls of Observation 



scribing an tgg of extra size, mentioned 
that it had all been laid by one hen. 
He sent for that reporter next day and 
asked him if he really supposed that two 
hens could lay a single tgg between 
them. 

That two inabilities so curiously anal- 
ogous should coexist in the same person 
furnishes an almost irresistible oppor- 
tunity for the construction of didactic 
parallels. It is worth noting that the 
unfortunate gentleman was at great 
pains to remedy his physical defect and 
to obviate its consequences, but his in- 
tellectual — or would you call it spiritual ? 
— infirmity he seems not to have at- 
tempted to cure. It shows how green 
our civilization still is, and how much 
the world has to learn, that no treat- 
ment has been devised to remedy a de- 
fective sense of humor. The deaf are 
taught to hear with their eyes, the dumb 
are taught to speak with their fingers 
and to talk actually with their vocal 
organs. If the blind have the least 
glimmer of light left to them the very 
utmost is made of it, but the man who 



1 68 



Missing Senses and New Ones 

cannot see a joke gets no help at all, and 
is exceptionally lucky if he even meets 
with sympathy. Let us hope it will not 
be so much longer ; but that by hypno- 
tism, or Christian science, or some un- 
expected application of electricity, the 
seat of humor may be reached and 
quickened. Love is the great sweetener 
that makes living tolerable and dying a 
good deal more comfortable than most 
people think, but after love, is there 
any other corrective of existence that is 
fit to compare with humor ? It greases 
the wheels so ! It makes so many bur- 
dens endurable that must have been 
crushing without it ! 

And if the lack of it is detrimental to 
anyone, it is so above all others to an 
American. It will not be seriously dis- 
puted that Americans have the sense of 
humor more generally developed than 
any other people (unless it is the Irish) ; 
but of all people they need it most, for 
the wear and tear of American life is 
prodigious, and the best friends of the 
American climate do not vaunt it as a 
conservator of energy. Irish humor owes 
169 



Windfalls of Observation 



its development, perhaps, to a protracted 
scarcity of the means of material enjoy- 
ment. Where people cannot find pleas- 
ure in what they possess, or what they 
consume, it behooves them to have what 
fun they may with what they think and 
say. And that the Irish do ; as witness 
Mr. Frederic's report of a remark of 
the late Baron Dowse, that it was better 
to have a small career in Ireland than a 
great one in England, because in Ire- 
land when one said funny things people 
comprehended them, and that made life 
worth living. 

Of course, when humor overflows its 
limits, and from being an aid to serious 
existence becomes its end, it looses its 
savor and ceases to be of use. It is 
no longer humor, then, but something 
coarser and more material. It is not the 
grease on the wheels any more, but the 
load on the wagon. It is with humor as 
it is with piety, it is liable to degenerate 
into self-worship, and then it is all up 
with it. " Very great is the difference," 
severely says Noah Porter, " whether we 
see through the disguise, the look of 
170 



Missing Senses and New Ones 

which the frivolous Bohemian can never 
rid himself, or the broad, swimming eyes 
of love with which Hood always looked 
through all his fun, or the sad earnest- 
ness into which Lamb relaxed as soon 
as he had stammered out his joke or his 
pun." Very great the difference, truly. 
The publican may have brought his 
sense of humor with him when he came 
out of the temple, but the Pharisee 
didn't. His was lost. Humor is incon- 
sistent with his frame of mind. 

Next to the sense of humor, which, 
after all, is only a branch of sight, the 
single sense that seems most indispensa- 
ble to man's enjoyment, though not to ^, 

. •* ■' ' ® The accont- 

his usefulness, is his hearing:. The e^reat j>iishment 
majority of people can see, hear, smell, deafness. 
taste, and touch. For the last three 
senses to be seriously impaired is un- 
common. Multitudes of people have 
imperfect vision, but most of them are 
so helped by eye-glasses that they make 
out very well. Imperfect hearing is 
much less common than imperfect sight, 
but it is a much worse scrape when it 

J7I 



Windfalls of Observation 



exists, because so little has been done to 
help it. If a man has any sight left in 
him at all, the spectacle-makers can fit 
him to enjoy the society and share the 
amusements of his fellows ; but if he is 
deaf, even in moderation, he may as well 
make up his mind to be in a considerable 
measure independent of society. It was 
a deaf person who was asked in what he 
took the most pleasure, and replied : " In 
reading, eating and drinking, the sight 
of my children, games and sports, and in 
the prospect of death." It was another 
deaf man who spoke of the measure of 
satisfaction he found in talking with a 
single companion ; but he added, " But 
hell comes into the room with the third 
person." 

To be handsomely and agreeably deaf is 
a very elegant accomplishment, fit to ex- 
ercise social talents of a high order. The 
person who aspires to it must check, in a 
considerable measure, a deaf person's 
natural tendency to shun society and 
flock by himself. He must continue to 
mix with his fellows, and when he does 
so, must in so far conceal his infirmity 
172 



Missing Senses and New Ones 



as to make it a cause of discomfort to 
none but himself. However little he 
hears he must never seem unduly desir- 
ous to hear more, or yet indifferent to 
what is being said. However impossible 
it may be for him to take part in conversa- 
tion he must neither permit himself to be 
bored nor to appear so. It is his business 
always to have the means of entertain- 
ing himself in his own head, so that 
while he continues in company his mind 
may be constantly and agreeably occu- 
pied, however little he may hear. In al- 
most any company a deaf man to whom 
things that have been said have to be 
repeated is a check to free discourse ; a 
deaf man who is eager to hear and can- 
not is a discomforting sight ; a deaf man 
who is bored and wishes himself else- 
where is a depressing influence; in 
either case he had better go elsewhere. 
The tolerable deaf man is one who, 
being in congenial company, can give 
pleasure by his mere presence, as he can 
take pleasure in merely having his 
friends about him. His thoughts must 
run, not on what he cannot hear, but on 

173 



Windfalls of Observation 



what he sees and feels, and upon the 
ideas that come into his own mind. A 
deaf man who is always able to entertain 
himself, and who is always glad, and 
never over-anxious to know what is go- 
ing on about him, has reasonable grounds 
for believing that at least he is not an 
incubus upon society. If to his negative 
accomplishments he can add the habit of 
having something worth hearing to say, 
he can even hope to be considered agree- 
able, and to have his society as welcome 
to ordinary selfish people as to the more 
benevolent. 

Whether general society is worth cul- 
tivating on these terms is another ques- 
tion, and the opinion that there is more 
of self-discipline in it than amusement 
seems not without some basis. Still, 
deaf people are bound to keep as much 
alive as they can, and it does not do for 
people who want to keep alive to live a 
life of too much solitude. Therefore, it 
is a good plan for deaf people to culti- 
vate a taste for anything that has a 
social side to it, but to the successful 
prosecution of which good hearing is not 

174 



Missing Senses and New Ones 



essential. Women, on whom deafness 
doubtless bears more hardly than on 
men, and who usually bear it with better 
grace, are likely to find profit in cultivat- 
ing, for one thing, a taste for dress ; for 
good clothes look as well on a deaf 
woman as on another, and give as much 
pleasure to the wearer as if she could 
hear. Moreover, the gratification inci- 
dent to fine raiment being incomplete 
until it has been shown, the possession 
of ravishing toilets is a constant and 
wholesome incentive to their owner to 
brave the discomforts of her infirmity 
and go among people who have eyes in 
their heads. The cultivation of the dress 
faculty is less important, but not unim- 
portant, for men. Both men and women 
who are deaf do well to cultivate a taste 
for all sorts of games, intellectual and 
athletic. A deaf man can play whist, or 
chess, or watch a horse-race. So, too, 
he can ride a horse, pull an oar, wield 
a tennis-bat, shoot, bowl, golf, and, with 
proper coaching, be a useful member of 
a base-ball nine. 

Deafness tends to the formation of 

175 



Windfalls of Observation 

fixed habits of life. It is less exasperat- 
ing at home than abroad ; among famil- 
iar scenes and faces than where every 
sight suggests a question, and reminds 
the would-be questioner that whatever 
answer he gets he will not hear it. The 
traveller needs all his faculties. The 
more he sees the more questions he 
wants to ask ; and the more new people 
he comes across, the more eager he is to 
test their quality. That is why the fool's 
paradise has a special snake in it for the 
deaf man. He can travel, of course, and 
get pleasure out of it, but he does it at 
a disadvantage, and will hardly choose it 
as an amusement exceptionally fit for 
him to cultivate. 

But if there are some senses a man 
may lose, we are taught in these days 
that there are probably whole sets of 
them which he may hope sometime or 
other to attain. Some are to be re- 
gained; others he has never developed 
yet. A favorite contemporary explana- 
tion of human abilities that are so far 
out of common that they seem occult, is 
176 



Missing Senses and New Ones 



the suggestion that they indicate the 
survival of senses or instincts that be- 
longed to man in his earlier stages of 
development, and were lost as he pro- 
gressed. The signs of such lost faculties, 
it is averred, are still to be seen in the 
lower animals, as when the carrier-pigeon 
shapes its flight without a compass, or a 
dog comes home a hundred miles across 
country without asking the way. The 
reason why such faculties have been lost 
to humanity is understood to be that 
men have ceased to need them. The 
development of language has permitted 
some to decay, and the decreased haz- 
ards of human existence have made 
others unnecessary, and they have dis- 
appeared through disuse. In their place 
have come special aptitudes suited to 
the new conditions of existence, such as 
the reading faculty, a miracle of optical 
training, but too common to be won- 
dered at. That, though, fails a little of 
being a perfect illustration of these sub- 
stituted faculties, because it is deliber- 
ately and methodically acquired. There 
are other faculties, and the signs and 

177 



Windfalls of Observation 



promise of still others, which are more 
nearly analogous to the lost animal in- 
stincts in being a sub-conscious develop- 
ment, incident to the conveniences or 
the peculiar perils of contemporary hu- 
man life. One such curious faculty is 
the familiar ability to awaken at a set 
time, which is an outgrowth of the mul- 
tiplication of time-pieces and of the need 
of acting on the minute. 

The existence of a still newer and 
more curious faculty was noted the other 
day by a newspaper correspondent, in a 
dissertation on contemporary existence 
as studied in the exceptionally contem- 
poraneous city of Chicago. He remarks 
two developments of it, which he calls 
The cable- the bridge and cable-car instinct. A 

car and *^ 

bridge in- vast amouut of daily local travel in Chi- 

stincts. Ai • T-k • 

cago crosses the Chicago River. But 
commerce makes constant use of the 
Chicago River, and the travel across 
it goes over draw-bridges. The well- 
known propensity of draw-bridges to be 
open when you want to cross them is 
reported to have developed, in some of 
the inhabitants of Chicago, an instinct 

178 



Missing Senses and New Ones 

It 

that admonishes them when a bridge 
that they are approaching is about to 
turn, so that they can hurry and cross 
it in time. What has stimulated the 
development of the bridge instinct is 
that in Chicago you must usually cross 
a bridge to catch a train, and to be 
" bridged " means usually to miss the 
train. 

"In the same way," says the corre- 
spondent, "the man with the cable-car 
instinct can tell when a cable -car is 
coming, even when the bell does not 
ring, and so save his life." Of course 
there is a suggestion of humor about 
these cases, but there is nothing scien- 
tifically amiss about the development 
they attest. The growth of a cable-car 
instinct (which in many American cities 
will be a trolley-car instinct) is likely to 
be promoted as other instincts are, by 
the survival of the fittest. Just as the 
infant monkey who doesn't clutch the 
limb, falls and is killed, so the American 
street -babe, whose trolley-car instinct 
is defective, fails to grow up. Nor is it 
more to expect of the sub-conscious in- 
179 



Windfalls of Observation 



telligence to take note of passing cars 
while the conscious mind is otherwise 
engrossed, than to expect the faculties of 
a sleeper to measure the lapse of time. 

It is only within the present genera- 
tion that the inability to see an electric 
current has been a source of peril to 
man. Surely we are entitled to look for 
an instinct that will meet that case too, 
so that a man may perceive what is 
going through a stray wire before he 
tak^s hold of it and gets killed. 



1 80 



XII 

A SERIOUS TIME OF LIFE 




A SERIOUS TIME OF LIFE 



IHAT is a serious time "of life 
when you begin to realize 
that the man you are is not 
the man you hope to become, 
but the man you have shown Thata^vk- 

. . . ivardpericd 

yourself to be ; a definite quantity with 'ivhenyou 
precise limitations, and not a great one. do^ieany-^^ 
We all compare ourselves at greater or '''""^■''^^• 
less distances with people in books and in 
history. There is a time when it is a de- 
lightful reassurance to learn from the lives 
of Keats, Pitt, Hamilton, or Henry Clay, 
th^-t ^e are not too young to be famous, 
an t' at men no older than we have 
immcirtalized themselves as poets or as 
statesmen. Again there comes a time 
when, we go to books for reassurances of 
another sort, and pluck up our fainting 
hopes as we read how Grant, Sherman, 
Cromwell, and Nathaniel Hawthorne 

183 



Windfalls of Observation 



reached our time of life without distin- 
guishing themselves beyond common, 
and yet lived to take rank among the im- 
mortals. There may be hope for us, we 
feel, for all of our forty odd years. And 
yet the late -blooming soldiers should 
not encourage us unduly, for a great 
soldier is only developed by war, and 
war, through no fault of his, may be very 
long in coming. 

The serious time of disquieting reali- 
zation comes to a man between these 
other two seasons. He has passed the 
time when any deficiencies in his work 
are palliated by his youth. Nobody can 
speak of him as " promising " any more. 
His blossoms are no longer a credit to 
him ; he must show fruit, or admit that 
he has none to show, recognizing that 
the natural inference based on experi- 
ence is that a man of his age who has 
done nothing that conspicuously justi- 
fies his existence never will do anything 
of that sort. A reasonable progress is 
still possible to him, of course, but in 
the natural course it is expected to be 
the continuation and perfection of what 
184 



A Serious Time of Life 

is behind him. A new quality, new 
phases of character, unsuspected talent, 
he may develop, but no one expects him 
to. If he himself expects to, it must be 
because he knows more about himself 
than he has disclosed. The story of the 
friend of William H. Prescott, who re- 
gretted that that gentleman's abilities 
were being put to no considerable use is a 
case in point. Prescott was approaching 
the serious period without showing any 
results. The reason was that he was at 
work on a ten-year task of history writ- 
ing. Presently the results came all to- 
gether. 

Ordinarily we do not look for matured 
fruits of a man's intelligence before he is 
thirty-five. Before that age he is at lib- 
erty to be clever. From then to forty 
is, in most cases, the serious time when 
he must do something important or else 
submit to be stamped as ordinary. If 
he cannot show power before he is forty, 
no one, except perhaps his wife, is going 
to believe it is in him. He cannot expect 
to be rated after that either by his hopes 
or his aspirations. 

i8S 



Windfalls of Observation 



A good many men, conscious of their 
impending doom, gather their forces 
during this period for a sink -or -swim 
struggle to assert themselves, and put 
their fate to the final touch. Among 
those who succeed the most usual sort 
of success is financial. Men who get 
very rich are apt to make their fortunes 
late in life. Whatever the sort of success, 
though, that comes after forty, whether 
it pertains to art, or literature, or gen- 
eralship, or statesmanship, or finance, it 
is but the harvesting of a crop already 
sown. Men's purpose after the serious 
time is to reap what they have consci- 
ously or unconsciously sown, and carry 
what they have got to the most advan- 
tageous market. It is the discovery of 
a fit market rather than the production 
of different commodities, that has been 
at the bottom of most of the success that 
has seemed late-won. 

There are some persons of more than 

the average abilities who will excuse 

themselves for approaching the serious 

time of life without any very noted ac- 

iS6 



A Serious Time of Life 



complishment, on the ground that they 
have always had to drudge, and have 
never had any spare time. It may be 
that in some cases the excuse will be 
valid. There was a man once, as every- 
one will remember, who expressed him- 
self as indifferent to the necessaries of 
life if he could only have its luxuries. It 
is a mere subdivision of his sentiment to 
say, " Give us our spare time, and we 
don't care what becomes of the rest." 

It must seem sometimes to everyone 
who accomplishes anything, that what- The great 
ever he does that is really worth while ^andvaiue 
has to be done in his spare time. It "(im^J'^ 
seems to be the intention that what a 
man does in the way of a regular task 
shall just about keep him alive and en- 
able him to hold his own ; and that what- 
ever progress he makes, if he makes any, 
is to result from his use of his leisure. 
Of course, there is no particular fun in 
plodding, every-day task-work, and, of 
course, there is a great deal that is exhil- 
arating in progress ; so it is reasonable 
enough for anyone to value the half- 
hours he gets ahead in, more than the 

187 



U^indfalls of Observation 



hours he spends in merely keeping up. 
There was an excellent illustration of the 
superiority of the fruits of leisure in the 
story that is told of Lowell's grateful re- 
ply to the young man who thanked him 
on his seventieth birthday for what he 
had done as a teacher. " I am glad you 
said that ; I've been wondering if I 
hadn't wasted half my life." He might 
have been sure, though, that his teaching 
time had not been wasted, even if the 
taught had made no sign ; for teaching 
was his task, and without a task there 
is no such thing as spare time, and the 
things a man can only do in spare hours 
never get done at all. 

It was complained at the New York 
Horse Show last fall, that the horses 
could not jump properly because there 
was no chance to warm them up. A 
horse who has it in him to jump seven 
feet isn't going to do it off-hand as he 
comes from his stall. He is more likely 
to do it after reasonable exercise at five 
and six feet. The less jumps don't tell in 
his record, but they do in his legs. Of 
course, there can be too much of a good 
1 88 



A Serious Time of Life 



thing, and it is possible to get all the 
jump out of him over four-foot hurdles. 
In like manner, it is possible for clever 
people to drudge away their wits. " No 
task no spare time ; no spare time no 
progress," is the rule ; but it has to be 
remembered that, so far as progress is 
concerned, too much task may prove, at 
least, as bad as none. 

Of course, being human, we all want 
the benefits of spare time without the 
trouble of hoarding it. Most of us 
grumble about the strength we waste 
over unprofitable tasks, and think with 
greed of the enormous progress that we 
would make if we could afford or dared 
to put in all our time in doing what was 
really progressive. Some of us, having 
the courage of our convictions, do 
achieve increased leisure, and put it to 
good use ; but I suspect that most of us 
need some sort of compulsion to put our 
machinery in motion, and find that when 
our other tasks have been abandoned 
our spare time becomes a task itself and 
loses its character, so that its products 
are not the same. A case that is familiar 
189 



Windfalls of Observation 



is that of Charles Lamb, eminent among 
the conservators of spare time, who 
longed so ardently for his release from 
his clerk's desk, and finally found his in- 
creased leisure so troublesome a boon. 

Novels have been written in the spare 
time of their authors, but people who get 
very far into novel-writing are apt to 
make that their task and find other occu- 
pation for their leisure. Novel-writing 
is rather too continuous to be an ideal 
spare-time employment. It isn't one of 
those things, like religion, in which peo- 
ple often seem to make better progress 
by working odd half-hours than others 
do who devote their whole time to it. 

A razor doesn't need as much grinding 
as a broad-axe, and it appears that a very 
moderate task is sufficient to put some 
people in perfect condition to use spare 
time to the greatest advantage ; which 
amounts to the same as saying that prac- 
tically all the work of such persons is di- 
rectly progressive. When a man reaches 
the point where he requires no tasks, can 
improve only three or four of his spare 
hours daily, and can conscientiously loaf 
190 



A Serious Time of Life 



and invite his soul the rest of the time, 
he has attained an enviable pitch of hu- 
man felicity. Old men are that way 
sometimes ; particularly aged poets. 
There is a theory that the imagination 
thrives on leisure, and that imaginative 
writers profit better by being very mod- 
erate in their daily demands on their 
wits. A favorite illustration of this the- 
ory is the reported case of a New Jersey 
novelist, of high contemporary renown, 
who writes two hours a day, and has the 
rest of his time to spare. Nature fur- 
nishes a parallel case in the geysers of 
the Yellowstone, some of which take 
twenty-three hours to get ready and only 
spout fifteen minutes. 

But spare time, when it comes in such 
bulk, ceases to be a luxury, and it usually 
happens that men who have no set tasks 
make tasks for themselves, and burden 
themselves with horses, or the care of 
property, or politics, or yachts, or hunt- 
ing, or courtship, or flirtation ; being 
willing to endure some pretence of a 
regular occupation, for the sake of its 
blessed intermissions. 



191 



XIII 

THE QUESTION OF AN 
OCCUPATION 




THE QUESTION OF AN 
OCCUPATION 

|NE of the ingenious persons 
who make interesting para- 
graphs in the newspapers, 
put into a Boston paper, the 
other day, a tale of a well-to- 
QO gentleman who had a son. For whom, 
when he came of age and had finished 
with the customary educational prelimi- 
naries, his father cast about for an occu- 
pation ; and himself having no business 
except to nurse his income, he wrote to 
twenty-four friends whose industrial ef- 
forts had resulted successfully, asking 
each what he thought was a good busi- 
ness, or profession, for a youth to start ^^"f^y^^^^^ 
in. The paragrapher's story is that each 
correspondent, in his reply, complained 
of his own calling, and advised the in- 
quirer to try something else. Whereat 

195 



Windfalls of Observation 



the father was disconcerted, and at last 
account the son was still idle. 

The story is reasonable enough to be 
true. It seems not to lie in the average 
man who knows what success in his par- 
ticular line of activity has cost him, to 
believe easily in another person's ability 
to pay the necessary price, escape fatal 
misadventures, and be favored by the in- 
dispensable lucky chances. Moreover, 
the thing that he has done looks small 
to him when he recalls the continuous- 
ness of the effort that accomplished it. 
When he makes his estimate of results 
he usually counts in dollars and cents, 
and is apt to overlook what every sincere 
moralist is bound to regard as the most 
important result of all, the effect of his 
exertions upon himself. The effort which 
has made him " successful " in the more 
limited sense, has developed his strength 
and his manhood. That was, or should 
have been, the result that the inquiring 
Boston parent sought for his son. Recog- 
nizing that to nurse an income is an old- 
gentlemanly avocation, and hardly fit to 
bring out the latent qualities of youth, 
196 



The Question of an Occupation 

he wanted, doubtless, to put his youngster 
somewhere where burden-bearing would 
make him sturdy ; but, like the rest of 
us, he wanted the sturdiness to be inci- 
dent to the acquisition of satisfactory 
pecuniary gains. 

Generally speaking, our American con- 
ception of profitable work is still some- 
thing that makes direct cash returns. 
We are perfectly aware that character is 
valuable, and that hard work is almost 
indispensable to its growth, yet our im- 
pulse is to measure the value of labor in 
coin. Even when we don't need, or 
really care about, the money our work 
might bring, we are apt to persist, from 
mere force of habit, in measuring it 
primarily by this standard, and second- 
arily, if at all, by its results in ourselves. 
The truth is, as the experience of the 
Boston father illustrates, that there is 
scarcely any calling the mere money re- 
turns of which will seem to its successful 
professors worth the pains they have cost. 
" I have had to work at this job ; " each 
of the Boston man's correspondents 
seems to have said ; " I had no choice, 

197 



Windfalls of Observation 



for I had to make a living. But with 
your son it is different. He can afford 
to choose something else." 

There is one sort of occupation for 
the well-to-do which does not get the 
credit that fairly belongs to it. It is 
a prevalent sentiment that men who 
have money enough should get out of 
business. What is the use, the feeling 
is, of going on and making more money 
when you have enough already ? But 
T/if conven- though a busincss at which money is not 

tenceo/kav- . , , • 

ing: a bust- made is not a good busmess to be m, 
family. ' thcrc is a great deal more in business 
than mere money making. A man who 
buys and sells, or manufactures and sells, 
is bound to keep in touch with his fellow- 
beings. He is bound, too, to keep his 
wits about him and to stay alive ; so long 
as he has control of important commer- 
cial interests he has power, and the more 
complete his control, and the greater the 
interests subject to it, the greater the 
power. There is no other high induce- 
ment for a man of leisure to go into pol- 
itics, except to acquire power .and use it 
wisely ; and if he can get more power 
19S 



The Question of an Occupation 

in selling groceries or meat, or making 
paper or cloth or soap, or running rail- 
roads or banks, it seems a bootless 
change for him to abandon those occu- 
pations, or fail to train his sons in them, 
merely because they are money-making 
employments and he has money enough. 
No family is so rich that it can afford 
not to work. If its members cannot 
work at what they wish to, they should 
do what poorer people have to do, and 
work at what they can. The American 
sentiment that everyone ought to have 
something to do, is a sound sentiment, 
and the Americans who live up to it are 
the ones who are the most useful to their 
country at home and most creditable to 
it abroad. Accordingly, a family with 
an hereditary business seems to be in an 
exceptionally felicitous situation. Such 
a family not only has possession of an 
industrial machine that will produce an 
income, but it has a training-school for 
its young men, and a constant incen- 
tive to perpetuate itself and keep up its 
standard as a family. It is an advantage 
about a business that it is exacting. A 
199 



IVindfalls of Observation 



family may own townships in the country, 
or squares in town, or have advantageous 
collections of securities in the vaults of 
a bank. Either of these possessions will 
stand a reasonable amount of neglect 
without very serious detriment, but a 
family with a business has got to sit up 
with it. Such a family can have its full 
share of play, but it cannot give itself 
over wholly to the demoralizing pursuit 
of pleasure. It has responsibilities, neg- 
lect of which is too perilous to be risked. 
Fortune has its hostages. It must keep 
up with the times or be run over. 

To be sure, the brains of the family 
may run out, or its energies fail ; and in 
that case the business that has been its 
feeder may quickly become a drain. If 
the family has gone hopelessly to seed, 
of course the sooner it gets out of active 
life the better. To close out its business 
then, is common sense. It is quite a 
different matter to cut loose from it while 
the family is still strong, and shows no 
signs of enfeeblement. That is to invite 
degeneration, to throw away the appa- 
ratus oy which the family has got its 
200 



The Question of an Occupation 

strength, and wait for sloth to over- 
whelm it. 



But there are many rich families that 
got rich out of land or stocks, and have 
no hereditary family business. Every 
year the American colleges are turning 
loose increasing numbers of the scions 
of such houses with the elements of edu- 
cation in them, but with ready-made in- 
comes large enough to live on, and no 
inherited business obligation, nor any 
special propensity toward any particular 
kind of work. A particular field in 
which all good Americans hope to see 

, .... , Politics 

such young men venture is politics, and might do, 
especially municipal politics. If the 
American young man who loves his work 
for his work's sake, and need not get his 
bread by it, should elect to take a hand 
in the government of cities, the result 
might be comforting to that respectable 
body of citizens who are tired of being 
governed by men who are in that busi- 
ness primarily because they find it a 
source of income. Of course, when the 
man who loves his work for his work's 

201 



Windfalls of Observation 



sake comes into competition in municipal 
politics, as elsewhere, with the man who 
is working for his dinner, his coat must 
come off, metaphorically speaking, if he 
is to accomplish anything. That is the 
beauty of it. It would be hard work ; 
harder than yacht-racing or even polo ; 
less vainly amusing, and less cheaply 
glorious, and fitter, on that account, to 
satisfy the aspirations of an energetic 
and devoted spirit. 

But for all that, theoretically, we expect 
our youth to go into politics and hope 
they will, it cannot be said for us that we 
if we hadn't givc them any urgent amount of practical 
'^ilto^^P encouragement. At the close of a din- 
f/anf^^^ ner given the other day by the friends of 
an eminent railroad president, to cele- 
brate his completion of a quarter of a 
century of railroad work, the beneficia- 
ry got on unaccustomed legs and told 
how it was that he happened to be a 
railroad man at all. He had been a law- 
yer, he said, with decided leanings tow- 
ard political life, and prospects of polit- 
ical success, when two eminent railroad 
men, a father and his son, approached 

202 



ne Qiiestion of an Occupation 

him. The son said : " We want your ser- 
vices." The father said : " Politics don't 
pay. The business of the future in this 
country is railroading." The upshot of 
it was that he dropped politics in great 
measure, and became the attorney for 
the railroad of which he afterward be- 
came president. The moral of Mr. De- 
pew's story seemed to be that he was a 
brand snatched from the burning, and 
that Commodore Vanderbilt's word fitly 
spoken had turned him from certain dis- 
appointment and sorrow to a success 
that was worth while. 

The fable teaches, or at least sug- 
gests, how very much we Americans ex- 
pect of our politicians. Nine-tenths of 
us are ready to admit that Commodore 
Vanderbilt's observation was accurately 
truthful, and to consider Mr. Depew's 
present position many times more felici- 
tous than it could have been if he had 
not accepted the Commodore's dictum 
and taken his advice. We, too, believe 
that politics don't pay, and we do our 
best to make the facts justify that opin- 
ion. We take it for granted that if a 
203 



Windfalls of Observation 



man can do anything else, he had better 
keep out of politics, and that if a man of 
ability does go into politics he is wasting 
his opportunities, and is probably some- 
thing of a rascal as well. We not only 
believe that our contemporary politics 
are dirty work, but by our attitude tow- 
ard them we insist that they shall be 
dirty work. If there is anything in public 
life that is worth attaining, we want to see 
it go to someone who is not a politician. 
We want our collectors and postmasters 
to be business men who have proved 
their competence by sticking close to 
business. We want our foreign ministers 
to be gentlemen of polish, skilled in let- 
ters and languages, and uncontaminated 
with too much familiarity with election- 
eering methods. We know that govern- 
ors and presidents cannot be elected 
without organization, but we insist that 
the proper men for those offices are men 
who are not subject to the sordid influ- 
ences of a *' machine." Our ideal public 
officer is a person who reluctantly per- 
mits himself to be dragged from the con- 
sideration of his private affairs to serve 
204 



The Question of an Occupation 

the public. Sharing Commodore Van- 
derbilt's frank opinion that " politics 
don't pay," we regard a young man who 
proposes any sacrifice of his pecuniary 
prospects to the hope of a public career 
with much the same sort of pitying con- 
tempt that is accorded to the business 
man who neglects legitimate sources of 
emolument for thedisastrous excitements 
of the bucket-shop. We believe that a 
system by which the politicians get the 
offices is a corrupt system, and yet we 
are aware that the offices and the con- 
sciousness of duty done are the only re- 
wards that political industry can honestly 
attain ; and we know, besides, that po- 
litical endeavor takes time, and that the 
consciousness of duty done will not sup- 
port mundane life. If a man neglects 
his chances of worldly well-being to carry 
the Gospel to the unconverted, we think 
he is a saint ; but if he neglects them to 
carry the ward, we think he is a fool, or 
if not, a knave anyhow ; and yet a coun^ 
try's political salvation is hardly less im- 
portant than the salvation of its individ- 
ual citizens, nor should politics be ranked 
205 



Windfalls of Observation 



much behind reUgion in the opportunities 
they offer to a devoted soul. 

Of course there is some excuse for us. 
The rapid development of the resources 
of a great country, with concurrent ac- 
cumulation of great fortunes and multi- 
plication of opportunities for money-mak- 
ing, have thrown the political profession 
into the shade. It has been found, es- 
pecially in the cities, that offices as a 
means of livelihood have had attractions 
chiefly for second- or third - rate men, 
who have done much to justify our low 
opinion of politicians in general. In the 
country districts, where money-making 
has been slower, office - holding has 
charms for a better class of men, and has 
kept in better repute. But both in and 
out of cities there is reason to believe 
that the professional politician does a 
great deal better by us than we have 
any title to expect. 

We scorn his avocation, and are al- 
ways ready to believe that he follows it 
from the lowest motives. We do not want 
to do his work ourselves ; that would 
take too much time and be too much 
206 



The Question of an Occupation 

trouble. We are willing that he should 
do the work, but if there are any legiti- 
mate office-holding emoluments of the 
work done, we want some " respectable 
person " in whom we have confidence to 
have them. Verily, the professional pol- 
itician, when he comes to consider what 
we think of him, what we expect of him, 
and what we are willing that he should 
get, must be amazed at our assurance. 

But perhaps politics will pay better 
presently ; if not absolutely better, at 
least relatively, because other things 
won't pay so well. And of course, when 
politics pay as well as law, and medicine, 
and drygoods, and the wholesale grocery 
business, we shall be able, without self- 
reproach or a loss of reputation, to take 
to them ourselves, and drive the poli- 
ticians out. 

To find a fit occupation for one's work- 
ing years is in the nature of a timely a provision 
provision for old age. But there are 
other provisions of that nature, which 
should be made in time too, and are 
hardly less important. 
207 



Windfalls of Observation 



When a man is planning for the com- 
fort of his mature and declining years, 
there are some things that he arranges 
for as matters of course. He will try to 
plan so that he may have an income pro- 
portionate to his habits of expenditure 
as long as he lives, and he will arrange, 
if possible, to have the income continue 
just the same to himself or his heirs after 
he is tired and stops working. He will 
be apt to try to arrange also to have a 
wife to grow old with, and to have chil- 
dren about him, in various convenient 
stages of development, to keep him in 
touch with contemporary life. And he 
will form the whist habit or the habit of 
reading books, and take reasonable meas- 
ures not to have gout, or dyspepsia, or 
any unreasonable affection of the liver. 

Such precautions any prudent man will 
take as he sees the propriety of them, 
and many others too ; but there are one 
or two comforts that he may miss by not 
appreciating their value until it is too 
late to provide for them. A particular 
luxury of this sort, for which a timely 
arrangement must be made if a man is to 
208 



The Question of an Occupation 

have it at all, is a periodical meeting with 
the men who were young when he was. 
In order to secure this enjoyment, it is 
necessary, in the first place, to be young 
with a considerable number of persons 
associated in the pursuit of some common 
interest, and to form more or less inti- 
mate relations with them. They must 
be the right sort of people, too ; people 
whom it is not only edifying to know 
while they are young, but who promise a 
development which will make a fair pro- 
portion of them good company in their 
maturity. Having formed such an ac- 
quaintance betimes, the habit of renew- 
ing it periodically should be started early 
and carefully nursed, the periods grow- 
ing gradually less until they become an- 
nual. 

The simplest way to accomplish all 
this is doubtless to go early in life to a 
good college, and return yearly to its 
Commencements. But where that has 
not been feasible, the same end is often 
otherwise accomplished, as by being a 
veteran of the war, and meeting one's 
fellow-veterans annually at a Grand Army 
209 



Windfalls of Observation 



Encampment ; or by being an earnest 
politician and getting sent pretty regu- 
larly to conventions. The points that 
require attention are, that you must meet 
old friends who were young, or compara- 
tively young, in your company, and from 
whom you are ordinarily separated. The 
old friends whom you meet every day 
won't do. You talk to them, when you 
see them, about what happened yester- 
day and was in the morning paper. The 
sight of them does not annihilate time 
for you ; your intercourse with them has 
been too constantly contemporaneous 
for that. But the old acquaintances whom 
you only see once a year carry you back 
every time to the years when you first 
knew them. 

It is a valuable refreshment to the 
spirit to be thus transported, and one 
which rightly constituted persons prize 
with increasing appreciation as the years 
pile up on them. After a man has found 
his vocation and got into the rut of it, 
existence comes to smack too much of 
the tread-mill, and a sensation that is 
quickening and pervasive, and out of his 



The Qjiestion of an Occupation 

every-day experience, is the more wel- 
come and the more reviving to him in 
proportion to the increase of the diffi- 
culty in finding it. 

Therefore, if you intend to be happy 
though old, form the habit early of regu- 
lar attendance on some periodical func- 
tion. Have a taste for something in 
particular, and stick to it until the other 
enthusiasts on the subject are old ac- 
quaintances. Then meet them persist- 
ently once a year, and presently you will 
have a habit that will be of real value to 
you when you have passed the time for 
making new friends. 



211 



XIV 
WOMEN AND FAMILIES 




WOMEN AND FAMILIES 

|R. GRANT ALLEN has been 

averring in the magazines, 
that we are not giving our 
young women the right sort 
of education ; and this not 
because our educational machinery can- 
not do what is expected of it, but because 
the thing that is expected is the wrong 
thing. He declares that the aim and re- 
sult of female education in America and 
England is to make sprightly and intelli- 
gent spinsters, whereas what ought to be 
its aim is, not to make spinsters at all, but 
to educate young women with a view to 
their becoming wives and mothers. Mr. ^^f^Slf 
Allen declares that, while it is essential -/''^'"^^^'^''•f- 
to the best interests of the state that 
ninety - something women out of every 
hundred should get married and have 
not less than four children apiece, and 
while an overwhelming majority of the 

215 



Windfalls of Observation 



women do get married, the whole hun- 
dred women are educated with a view to 
the best interests of a half-dozen or less 
of them, who become old maids. Mr. 
Allen's blood boils at this, and he says 
flatly that the women who do not mar- 
ry, though charming possibly as individ- 
uals, are socially and politically of no ac- 
count in comparison with those who do. 
Mothers are what the country needs, he 
says, and he calls for them with the 
energy of a foundling asylum, while he 
avers that literary women, school-mis- 
tresses, hospital nurses, and lecturers on 
cookery are the natural product of our 
system of education as it is. He does 
not deny that these are useful products, 
but he does deny that the system that 
produces them fits our needs. 

Mr. Allen also records his fears that 
if the theories of the advanced women 
are not checked, the invaluable faculty 
of intuition, which is a distinguishing 
feminine characteristic, will be educated 
away, with the direful result that men of 
genius will cease to be born. For the 
intuitive faculty pertains to genius as 
216 



Women and Families 



well as to femininity. Genius does not 
stop to reason. It arrives, by a sudden 
and immediate process which it inher- 
ited from its mother. It knows, it 
knows not how. It only knows that it 
knows, as women do. 

It would be a dreadful pity to have 
genius stumbling about in limbo for lack 
of a woman fit to be a mother to it. Let 
us hope it will not really come to such 
a forlorn extreme as that. Would it be 
inexcusable to derive the impression 
from Mr. Grant Allen's forebodings, 
that, learned as he is in natural history, 
his knowledge of the human female is 
defective ? To my mind she seems to 
be constructed of much tougher mater- 
ials than Mr. Allen imagines, and the 
influences that tend to make a man of 
her seem enormously overbalanced by ugfe^^j 
those whose tendency is to keep her a ^>4«f7''^'««« 
woman. For my part I am not a bit dotihersex. 
afraid but that when God made wom- 
an He endowed her with persistence 
enough to maintain the characteristics 
of her sex. Monkeys may have evo- 
lutionized into Herbert Spencers, but 
217 



IVindfalls of Observation 



have the females of any species ever yet 
evolutionized into males ? Of course, 
there are masculine women ; women af- 
flicted from birth with mannish minds 
and predisposed to channels of useful- 
ness which are more commonly navi- 
gated by men. Such women are not all 
Sally Brasses either. Some of them 
even presume to marry and have chil- 
dren. But they are exceptional creat- 
ures, and are easily counter-balanced by 
the feminine men. The average woman 
is a thorough-going female, and is not 
to be educated out of it. You may teach 
her Latin, you may let her operate a 
type-writer, or teach school, or work in 
a factory, or dot off language by tele- 
graph, and become as independent as 
you please. She is a persistent female 
still. 

Mr. Allen is so much in the habit of 
knowing what he is writing about, that it 
is not safe to enter any general denial 
of the truth of what he says about the 
schools, but he seems to blame, for the 
condition that he condemns, those ex- 
ceptional and comparatively unimpor- 
218 



Women and Families 



tant spinsters who are supposed to ben- 
efit by it. A wiser theory appears to be 
that in this case, as in most others, if 
there is anything wronsr about women 
and their concerns it is the fault of the danger, 
men. So prevalent among women is the 
amiable wish to please the lords of crea- 
tion, that it may reasonably be doubted 
whether they ever do anything amiss the 
motive for which cannot be traced to this 
desire. Though Eve ate the forbidden 
fruit, it is nowhere denied that Adam 
had twitted her about the comparative 
unimportance of her attainments, and 
had bred in her a restless appetite for 
miscellaneous learning which made her 
the serpent's easy prey. Is it not so 
with our female education ? If there is 
anything wrong with it, are not the men 
to blame ? Our girls cannot be mothers 
and have the four children apiece that 
Mr. Allen calls for until they have first 
become wives, and, in order that they 
may become wives, it is important that 
they shall be educated on such a sys- 
tem as will produce results such as men 
most admire. If it is true, as Mr. Allen 
219 



Windfalls of Observation 



says, that the present system produces 
literary women, school-mistresses, and 
lecturers on cookery, it will probably be 
found, on investigation, that it is pre- 
cisely those species of educated female 
that the unmarried male most affects. 
No doubt female education is all wrong 
if Mr. Allen says it is, but before he 
sets it right let him consider whether 
a safer way is not to try and teach a 
wiser discrimination to his males. To 
find as the result of an educational ex- 
periment that he has a lot of young 
women on his hands when his men are 
not disposed to marry, would be an aw- 
ful result ; the more so because his girls, 
being all educated to be mothers, might 
lack the special training necessary to 
spinsterial success. 
^^j^ If Mr. Allen will only stir up his 

remedy. malcs, and scc to it that they are com- 
petent, faithful, good providers, and en- 
dowed with approved notions as to the 
selection of mates, he may cease to dis- 
tress himself. The proportion of the 
gentler sex who insist upon reasoning 
by logical processes, and competing with 
220 



IVomen and Families 



men in bread-winning avocations, will 
not be great enough to afford him legit- 
imate distress. Take care of your men, 
Mr, Allen, and your women won't have 
to take care of themselves. And if they 
don't have to, they won't do it. The 
fact that some women who have no one 
else to take care of them are taught to 
take care of themselves, seems a remote 
reason for alarm. A woman even with 
blunted intuitions is better than a wom- 
an under six feet of earth. 

Directly in the face of Mr. Grant Al- _ „, 

, . Mr. War- 

len s complamt that culture is monopo- ner also 
lizing the female, comes the assertion of c^karges, 
Mr. Charles Dudley Warner that the 
American female is monopolizing Ameri- 
can culture. Mr. Warner, who is a liter- 
ary man and interested in the sale of 
books, has, possibly, acted from inter- 
ested motives in letting loose this 
alarming theory. He has observed the 
tendency of young females of this gen- 
eration to aggregate themselves into 
groups, meeting weekly for the culti- 
vation of what by the courtesy of the 

221 



Windfalls of Observation 



males they are permitted to term their 
intellectuals. Because young women 
run to clubs and associations as they 
do, he would have us believe that 
they are doing about all the reading 
that is being done, and are getting the 
bulk of the culture, bating a few stray 
spears of it that ministers and pro- 
fessional literary men pick up in the 
exercise of their callings. Mr. Warner 
insinuates that the men occupy their 
working hours in money-making, and 
that their conversation in moments of 
recreation tends to relate to matters 
connected with business, varied by such 
topics as " horse " and feeding, and he 
assumes to have forebodings as to what 
the contemporary young man's feelings 
will be when some girl undertakes some 
time to talk to him about some new 
book. 

No one can safely tell Mr. Warner 
that he does not know anything. The 
Hartford editor is too considerable a 
gun to be spiked in any such peremp- 
tory manner. But one may venture to 
say softly that he ought to know better 

222 



Women and Families 



than to be scared at the thought of 
those clubs. As an expert in feminine 
traits, he should need no one to tell 
him that it is the instinct of the aver- 
age young female to do things collec- 
tively. He seems to think that she gets 
up clubs because she likes books. Sim- 
ple male ! The truth is that she gets 
up literature because she likes clubs. 
She will take up with anything, from 
Browning to working-girls, that gives 
her occasion to aggregate herself of 
a morning with other young females 
and taste the sweets of companion- 
ship. 

Not that one can blame her ! Far 
from it. Woman, poor thing, as a rule 
can't go to an office. Her day's work is 
an irregular sort of a job that keeps her 
more or less at home. Her clubs and 
classes take her out, give her set occu- 
pation, wake up her faculties and do her 
good of very much the same sort that 
a man gets from selling coal or stocks, 
or discussing measures to keep the 
moths out of last winter's unsold wool- 
lens. But the idea that she learns so 



223 



IVindfalls of Observation 



much as to make the men uncomfort- 
able is a mistake. She will impart to 
some young man, in the first place, every- 
thing that she gathered in at her club, 
and he will get the benefit of it. And 
in the next place, the only people who 
get hold of book knowledge enough to 
make anyone uncomfortable are those 
who read at home to themselves, in 
their odd minutes and their even hours, 
because they like it. 

From a professional point of view, it 
which is is mean for Mr. Warner to go back on 
S.'* his men. They are his true friends and 

supporters. If a man wants to read a 
book he buys it, and if he likes it he 
buys six more copies and gives them 
(not all the same day, of course) to six 
women whose intelligence he respects. 
But if a club of fifteen girls determine to 
read a book, do they buy fifteen copies ? 
No. Do they buy five copies ? No. 
Do they buy — no, they don't buy at all ; 
they borrow a copy. It doesn't lie in 
womankind to spend money for books, 
unless they are meant to be a gift for 
some man. 

224 



Women and Families 



And apropos of literature and petti- 
coats, an accomplished critic, who re- 
cently discussed in a contemporary 
magazine the needs and possibilities of 
American fiction, declared that the com- 
ing woman in American novels was the ^min^' 
married woman. The novel of the fut- >~«"^r 
ure, this gentleman thinks, will begin '«''''''^''<^-' 
where the contemporary novel ends, at 
marriage. He declares that it is vain to 
hope to make great stories about young 
maidens whose experience of life is nec- 
fissarily limited, and whose ideas and 
emotions are bounded by their experi- 
ence. Women of maturity, the wives 
and mothers of humanity, are bound to 
be a great deal more interesting from 
their greater experience of life, and are 
vastly fitter to be the leading figures in 
the searching and comprehensive fiction 
soon to come. The married woman, our 
critic insists, is not only to be the hero- 
ine of the future American novel, but 
she is to write it too ; since in the po- 
lite circles, it seems, where married wom- 
en have leisure and opportunity to make 
themselves of interest, women are the 
225 



Windfalls of Observation 



only members in whom are combined the 
knowledge, taste, and leisure requisite 
for the task. 

It is undeniable that married women 
of reasonable maturity have commonly 
seen more of life, and know more that is 
worth narrating than the damsels whose 
wooing forms the staple of modern 
tales. None the less, as a subject of fic- 
tion, the maid has several decided ad- 
vantages over the matron. In stories 
where the heroine is to scour the Span- 
ish Main for pirates, or head exciting 
quests for buried treasure, a previous 
matrimonial experience is a matter of 
indifference, and a matron will do at 
least as well as a maid. But where the 
substance of the story concerns the de- 
velopment of affection between a man 
and a woman, to start with a marriage 
is apt to make awkward work. Who is 
the heroine to fall in love with ? Her 
husband ? No ; that seems not to be 
the intention. Some other woman's 
husband ? More than likely ; or, if not, 
with some single gentleman of means 
and defective occupation. But for a 
226 



Women and Families 



married woman to have a man in love 
with her whom she cannot marry is a 
misfortune, and for her to fall in love 
with a man not her husband is mis- 
chievous. Such a predicament may be 
excusable in an occasional story, as such 
predicaments are occasionally excusa- 
ble in real life ; but that the American 
fiction of the future is to be a record 
of this type of hazardous experience of 
women is a gloomy prospect indeed, and 
one in which I do not believe. If the 
married woman is to be the heroine of 
the coming novel, it must turn on some- 
thing besides love-making. It must be 
the story of her career ; of her profes- 
sional or political success ; of her pain- 
ful accession through toilsome decades 
to the front rank of the doctors ; of the 
money she made, and what she did with 
it. American women are very much 
alive in these days. There is no spe- 
cial difficulty about writing interesting 
books about them without using men at 
all, except as puppets or lay figures. 



227 



XV 
AS TO DEATH 




AS TO DEATH 

[O many people are dying 
these days, said a writer of 
a letter of condolence dur- 
ing a recent epidemic of the 
grip, " that one feels like 
apologizing for being alive." " I have 
lost my confidence in life," said a parent 
whose fold pneumonia had broken into. 
" So have I, in a measure," was the re- 
ply ! " but I find my confidence in death 
correspondingly strengthened." 

We are very slow about gaining con- 
fidence in death — curiously slow, con- 
sidering how familiar our acquaintance 
with it is. And yet life is an exceeding 
complicated task, and death, to us who 
have not tried it, seems wonderfully 
concise and simple. No complaints 
come from those who have died, and, 
what is more to the point, very few 
shadows of dissatisfaction are seen to 
231 



Windfalls of Observation 



hover over the dying. The dread and 
discontent with death is in the living. 
Doctors tell us that the dying rarely 
fear the change which they feel ap- 
proaching. Afar-off death is a mon- 
ster, but brought near to it is usually 
divested of its horror, and becomes 
manifest as the natural thing that it is. 

We make far too much ado about it. 
To have friendship and companionship 
go out of our lives is a real loss, and our 
grief for that is a natural feeling which 
we would not wish, as we need not hope, 
to be rid of. But the sensation of vague 
woe which survives all our experience 
and all our intelligent conceptions of 
the matter, is something to be recog- 
nized and overcome. The^ instinctive 
feeling, that a person who has died is 
the victim of great misfortune, and that 
we who survive have unwillingly got 
the better of him, is a sensation that 
civilized and religious people ought to 
get over. " Poor John," we say, "poor 
Mary," and deck ourselves in black, 
which nine times out of ten, whatever 
we may think about it, is the expression 
232 



As to Death 



of our realization that a dreadful thing 
has happened — not to us, but to some- 
one whom we love. If we ceased feel- 
ing sorry for those who are lost to us, 
and could confine ourselves to mourn- 
ing for ourselves whose the loss is, we 
should conduct ourselves much more 
nearly in accordance with the facts as 
we know them. 

Nothing that we know about death 
warrants us in thinking so meanly of it 
as we do. It is unfortunate for its repu- 
tation that it is associated with pain, 
sickness, and the demoralization of our 
faculties. Inevitably, it shares the repu- 
tation of the company it keeps. If it 
were something that we attained as the 
ultimate triumph of our fullest strength 
and energy, we should be bound to think 
better of it. And yet there is no con- 
ception of death which is tolerable or 
reasonable, which does not involve the 
belief that it is promotion. When char- 
acter seems perfected, and achievement 
absolute, it is the next step ; when char- 
acter, still far short of perfection, seems 
to have ceased to progress, and honor- 

233 



Windfalls of Observation 



able achievement from whatever cause 
seems barred, it is a change which at 
least gives ground for renewed hope. 
Of some who die, we are sure that the 
transition was from one sphere of useful 
and progressive activity to another. As 
to others, we feel that, so far as we see, 
it was a gain for them to be rid of flesh 
that seemed to clog their spirits, and 
perhaps to drag them down. Looking 
at people with open eyes and reasonably 
full knowledge, and weighing what life 
brings them with the penalties they 
have to pay, there will not be so very 
many of whom we shall feel sure — even 
with our natural prejudice in favor of 
a certainty that we know as against a 
chance that we surmise about — that they 
possess so much as not to afford to take 
the chance. 

Effort! is not that the finest thing in 
life ? Effort that trains the mind, that 
trains and subjugates the body, that 
controls and directs the temper, that 
makes character ! Is life without effort 
of value ? Is life valuable when effort 
ceases to be possible ? And yet life that 

234 



j4s to Death 



is yoked so to effort surely gets to be a 
weary business, first or last. " This rest 
is glorious ! " said John Ericsson, on his 
death - bed. There was no grumbling 
there ! Too much hard work had been 
done to admit of that. 

" Gladly I lived, and gladly I die," 
was the sentiment of the confident spirit 
whose epitaph Mr. Stephenson under- 
took to provide. That is the right feel- 
ing. We are not half glad enough to be 
alive, not nearly as pleased as we should 
be at the prospect of dying. We should 
form our opinions of death less by its 
concomitants immediately on this side 
of the grave, and much more by the 
splendid company of the brave, the kind, 
the wise, and the true, who know what 
we can only guess about its benefits. 



^35 



XVI 

INCLINATIONS AND 
CHARACTER 




INCLINATIONS AND 
CHARACTER 

|N its eulogy of a famous and 
beloved American, who died 
the other day, a contempo- 
rary newspaper remarked 
that "he was one of those 
fortunate creatures who seem never to 
be compelled to do anything that is con- 
trary to their inclinations." That Mr. 
Curtis should have so impressed a coeval 
observer recalls Lowell's estimate of his 
friend, 

Whose Wit with Fancy arm in arm, 
Masks half its muscle in its skill to charm. 

If he seemed to do nothing that he 
did not wish to do, no doubt it was ^^^.^^^ 
partly because he brought a gracious tratedin 

^ 1. 1 . 1 the case of 

performance to even unacceptable tasks; Mr. Curtis, 
but the other reason may well have been 

239 



Windfalls of Observation 



that his incHnations were so uplifted 
and disciplined that he could afford to 
follow them, and that in following 
straightly after duty he had approached 
that enviable elevation where 

Love is an unerring light, 
And joy its own security. 

Hardly any better fortune can come 
to a conscientious man than to find his 
inclinations fit and feasible to follow. 
In many cases it happens, through no 
fault of his, that he cannot do what he 
wants to. Obligations are laid upon 
him that he is bound to discharge, and 
in discharging them he has to turn his 
face whither he would not choose to go, 
and do the work that is put before him 
rather than that his heart is in. But in 
very many other cases the choice is with- 
in his reach, if only he has the manhood 
to make it and the resolution to stick to 
it. If there are lions in his path he must 
have grit enough to drive them out of 
it, even though that is a tedious process. 
When the choice is a high choice, and 
240 



Inclinations and Character 

the man is a strong man in earnest, the 
lions have to move out. The average 
man, of course, prefers to go round 
them, even though the detour gets him 
into byways that are not of his choice. 

By far the most potent factor in these 
days in luring high-minded and able 
men from doing the work of their 
choice, is the superior opportunity of 
money-making in other directions. That 
avails too often to win born-writers 
away from letters, and to keep born- 
statesmen out of politics, and born- 
preachers out of the pulpit. To most 
Americans poverty is not absolute but 
relative ; not a matter involving the 
necessaries and reasonable comforts of 
life, but the question of living on an 
equal scale of luxury with one's asso- 
ciates. Many men to whom high-think- 
ing might have been possible, have suf- 
fered an aversion to plain-living to turn 
their intellectual energies into more 
commonplace channels. Many others, 
who cared little for luxuries for them- 
selves, have drudged, and humbled their 
talents, to procure them for their fami- 
241 



iVindfalls of Observation 



lies. It was said not long ago of Bea- 
consfield, in contrasting him with Salis- 
bury, that " He possessed nothing, and 
he did not want to possess anything. 
He never really owned an acre of land 
in his life, and if he had just enough 
money for current expenses he was 
thankful not to be troubled with more." 

If that w^as truly his disposition, it was 
a superlatively fortunate endowment for 
an intellectual man who had no mind to 
do what was contrary to his inclina« 
tions. 

Inclinations of so high an order that 
their fulfilment brings contentment and 
honor, and of so stanch a quality that 
they can withstand allurements of 
wealth, ease, or office bought at any 
cost of independence, are so essentially 
a part of the individual who possesses 
them, that they may be accurately and 
more succinctly defined as character. 
Men who have such inclinations are not 
common, but men who follow them out 
are rare. If Mr. Curtis followed his, it 
was up the hill and over it. He even 
voluntarily placed between himself and 
242 



inclinations and Charactef 

their fulfilment the gratuitous obstacle 
of a great debt for which he was neither 
in law nor in equity responsible. They 
led him away from allies of life-long as- 
sociation, through much that was haz- 
ardous, and much that was disagreeable. 
He followed them with admirable con- 
stancy. To have possessed such inclina- 
tions was not an incident but an achieve- 
ment, and to have followed them out 
was victory — a victory whose richest 
fruit was that it gave to American citi- 
zenship an ideal Independent. 

In some instances lofty inclinations 
develop into character ; in others they 
do not. So common among men is the 
case of inclinations that seem to have 
no practical force, that a contemporary 
observer announces, as a result of notice 
taken, that some men have morals, and 
others principles. Of course, it happens 
occasionally that people have both, as 
others a2:ain have neither ; but, accord- ^ 

'^^ 11- Some men 

ine to the experience of the observer m haveprinci- 

^ . , 1 J>les, and 

question, such cases are more or less ex- others 
ceptional. He cites instances of politi- ^''''^'• 

243 



Windfalls of Observation 



dans, the most scrupulous in their pri- 
vate practices, and most unprincipled in 
their political acts, and contrasts them 
with other politicians of the severest po- 
litical morality, but not immaculate in 
all their personal relations. There are 
so many cases of eminently moral men 
who lacked political virtue, and so many 
more of immoral men who had it, that 
historical research can easily take such 
a turn as to leave the seeker wondering 
whether there is not something about 
private morality which is incompatible 
with successful cultivation of state-craft. 
What is true in that direction is that 
there is probably something about ordi- 
nary domestic felicity which is hostile to 
political success, for the simple reason 
that a man with a family to live with, 
and probably to support, can give only a 
divided attention to politics, and politics 
is a game which demands the concentra- 
tion of the whole man. The most suc- 
cessful politicians of recent times, with 
some exceptions, have been bachelors, 
childless married men, and husbands 
whose homes were not happy. Celibacy 
244 



Inclinations and Character 

is at least as desirable in a politician as 
in a priest, the main difference being 
that, whereas it is useful to a priest as 
long as he is a priest, there may come to 
a politician a time when the storm and 
stress period of his career is so distinct- 
ly over, that he might as well get mar- 
ried as not. 

Apart from politics and its professors, 
there are several reasons why principles 
are more apt to appear as a substitute 
for morals than to accompany them. 
For one, a man whose daily walk is dis- 
creet, and who behaves wisely and knows 
it, acquires confidence in his instincts, 
and is reasonably well satisfied that he 
does about the right thing, and that his 
conduct in future is likely to be as cor- 
rect as it has been in the past. A prin- 
ciple is a fixed opinion, but your moral 
man, who has confidence in his habits, 
is apt to be guided very much more by 
them than by his opinions. A conse- 
quence of which often is, that his habits 
gain in strength until they get undesir- 
ably powerful, and his opinions grow 
vague for lack of practical demonstra- 

245 



Windfalls of Observation 



tion. The more fixed his moral habits 
become, the more instinctive grows his 
behavior, and the less occasion he has 
to reason as to what is right or wrong, 
or to develop opinions into principles. 

But with the man of no morals it is 
very different. Realizing his large po- 
tentiality for loose behavior, recogniz- 
ing the unreliability of his instincts, and 
knowing that such habits as he has are 
mostly bad, he feels the uncertainties of 
his. anchorages, and the great need of 
having something sure to tie to. What- 
ever worse things he may do, he deter- 
mines that at least he will approve the 
better. A sinner he may be, but not an 
unprincipled sinner. He will know right 
from wrong anyhow, whether he acts 
upon what he knows or not. Prompted 
by such necessities, he pays attention to 
his opinions, taking care to hold those 
most approved, to hold them continu- 
ously, and to support them by the best 
arguments obtainable. The fact that he 
does not permit his behavior to affect 
his principles, or vice versa^ frees him 
from many embarrassments that would 
246 



Inclinations and Character 

be incident to a different system. The 
consequence is that his principles in- 
crease in height and splendor, until the 
man of mere morals, hearing him hold 
forth, feels his knees knock together at 
the thought of his own inferiority. 

If anyone doubts that it works this 
way, a convincing illustration is found 
in a general comparison of men with 
women. Women are absurdly superior 
to men in their morals, but only an ad- 
venturous disputant would deny that 
men have stricter and more definite 
principles. 



247 



XVII 

A POET AND NOT 
ASHAMED 




A POET AND NOT 
ASHAMED. 

|NE characteristic of Tenny- 
son that looms up large in 
the figure of him that is left 
to us, was his ability to take 
himself seriously as a poet. 
Since his death a story has been in cir- 
culation about the experience of a cer- 
tain exceptionally favored young wom- 
an, who went off on a yachting trip with 
a small party of which Lord Tennyson 
and Mr. Gladstone were members. She 
said, or at least the newspapers reported ^^^7,^^. 
her as saying, that though the trip was YJZS 
delightful it was not entirely free from beingapoet. 
friction, arising from Mr. Gladstone's 
propensity to talk in moments in which 
Lord Tennyson wished to recite verses. 
Indeed, the lady intimated that the solid 
day did not seem to Mr. Gladstone too 
long for him to talk through, or offer to 

251 



Windfalls of Observation 



Lord Tennyson an unreasonably pro- 
tracted space for the recitation of his 
own poems, and that it sometimes hap- 
pened that the decks of the yacht were 
cleared of all the passengers except two, 
the old statesman at one extremity lost 
in an impassioned monologue of discus- 
sion, and the venerable bard rehearsing 
Tennysonian poetry at the other. 

This may not be a true story at all, 
and very likely it is exaggerated even if 
there are facts to it, but whether fact or 
fiction it illustrates well-known charac- 
teristics of the two masters that it con- 
cerns. Tennyson never doubted that 
his verse was worth imparting. Words- 
worth believed implicitly in himself as 
the greatest poet of his day, and sus- 
pected that his day was the golden age 
of all poetry. His public disputed his 
opinion for many years, but finally came 
two-thirds of the way over to his way of 
thinking. Tennyson also made up his 
mind pretty early in life that he was a 
poet and a great one. The evidence he 
submitted in support of that conclusion 
was less conflicting than Wordsworth's, 
252 



A Poet and Not Ashamed 

and the public was quicker in conceding 
that he was right. And having demon- 
strated that he was a poet, and chosen 
poetry for his vocation, he revered his 
office and stuck to it. He took his work 
seriously, and himself seriously as the 
man to whom it was appointed to do the 
work. Always and everywhere where 
he went as a man, he went as a poet too. 
He must have been a poet even to his 
valet. To him there was nothing more 
absurd in the figure of himself in a cloak 
and a slouch hat reciting his own verses 
on the deck of a yacht than there is in 
the presence of an archbishop in full 
canonicals doing his office in the chan- 
cel of St. Paul's. That a poet should 
be picturesque and poetical seemed no 
more a thing to smile at than kingliness 
in a king. 

And the beauty of it was that he was 
right. By magnifying his office he dig- 
nified it, and gained dignity for himself 
as its fit administrator. His safety lay 
in his possession of the inestimable 
treasure of simplicity. He did not as- 
sume, he developed. He did not pose, 

253 



iVindfalls of Observation 



he simply behaved as he felt. His ideals 
were lofty, his thoughts were trained to 
clothe themselves in poetical images, 
and his conduct and bearing were sim- 
ply the shadow of the inner substance. 
Neither were absolutely contemporane- 
ous, but much about both had the im- 
perishable quality which is never in the 
fashion and happily never out of it. 

In this land and in these days we are 
apt to giggle at great offices. To our 
eyes the divinity that doth hedge a king 
appears full of holes. Wigs and laced- 
coats and high-heeled boots possess no 
illusions for us any longer, and perhaps 
we are somewhat too prone to extend 
our humorous disregard for such dis- 
carded trappings to the substantial su- 
periority they were once designed to fit. 
We are so ready to make game of the 
poetical aspirations of poets generally, 
that ours are apt to choose to be before- 
hand with us, and extenuate the possi- 
ble absurdity of their own aspirations by 
smiling deprecations before and after. 
Now that Walt Whitman is dead, no 
American would dare look and act like 



254 



A Poet and Not Ashamed 

a poet even if he felt or wrote like one. 
Our poets are somewhat too apt to 
be spruce gentlemen in patent - leather 
shoes, who make verses in such odd 
hours as they can spare from the serious 
concerns of life. And one cause of their 
being so is the reiterated suggestion of 
a stiff-necked generation, that a sincere 
poet who believes in his office and lives 
up to it is a more or less absurd creat- 
ure, who owes us all an apology for not 
doing something more lucrative and 
really useful. We have talked that way 
about poets so long that it looks a lit- 
tle as though ours had finally come to 
believe us, and put their best energies 
into other work. It might be better for 
them, and for us too, if they would shut 
their eyes to our quirks and giggles, and 
pattern a little more after Tennyson, 
who chose to be a poet, and was that 
and nothing else, all his life, and with- 
out evasion, apology, or remorse. 

But if the irreverent American humor 
has not developed without some corrup- 
tion of precious ideals, it has much to 

255 



Windfalls of Observation 



One good 
mark for 
A merican 
irreverence. 



It has 

helped to 



kill 
code. 



the 



offer in extenuation of itself in the shape 
of smashed idols with clay feet, whose 
usefulness, if they ever had any, was 
long since past. One such fetish that, 
so far as this country is concerned, has 
had the foundations laughed quite out 
from under it, is that curious device for 
defeating the natural superiority of mind 
over matter, which was known as " the 
code." To be sure, " the code " got its 
death-blow as an American institution 
as long ago as when Aaron Burr's bullet 
put a nation in mourning. It has never 
really flourished since then, though it 
did linger on fitfully and obscurely until 
after the civil war. But some of the 
manners and methods that were origin- 
ally tributary to it survived it, and it 
has been left to this generation to laugh 
them little by little into contemptuous 
disuse. Men still quarrel and still ex- 
change blows in anger, but not only the 
notion that differences between " gentle- 
men " must be settled on the field of 
honor has clean gone out ; but behavior 
which had some appearance of sense 
while that notion still held has finally 
256 



A Poet and Not Ashamed 



come to be estimated as the archaism 
that It is. The age of " rotten boroughs, 
knee-breeches, hair- triggers, and port,'' 
has not only past, but its works have so 
far followed it that in America persons 
who attempt to shape their conduct by 
the standards of that age merely find 
that an amused and smiling public cred- 
its them with " courtly bar-room man- 
ners," and sniggers at their discomfiture. 
The " gentleman " who has done another 
gentleman an injury is not considered 
any less a blackguard because he offers 
his victim " any reparation in his power." 
To run the injured man through the 
body, or perforate his vitals with lead, 
is so universally understood to be an in- 
different justification of an offence, that 
a culprit who goes out of his way to sug- 
gest it in any overt dispute finds himself 
most uncomfortably in contempt of pub- 
lic opinion. So the public insult, which 
would once have had to be expunged 
with blood, has relapsed from its high 
estate of being a gentlemanly act into a 
mere loaferish breach of the peace, to 
be settled for in a police court. 

257 



Windfalls of Observation 



The fatal defect in these discarded 
standards was that they were not demo- 
cratic. They never promoted, or were 
intended to promote, the greatest good 
of the greatest number, but merely con- 
tributed to the exaltation of the few 
who aspired to be superior to rules that 
might be fit for the vulgar. Now and 
then someone stumbles across the con- 
temporary stage who, from living too ex- 
clusively in some narrow club circle in 
Europe, or even here, has failed to ap- 
preciate the spirit of the age, and at- 
tempts in some juncture to shape his 
conduct according to the notions of gen- 
tlemanly behavior that obtained in Lon- 
don clubs as late as the days of George 
the Fourth. It is only by watching the 
absurd contortions of such unfortunates 
that we are able to realize the progress 
that has been made. Since the theory 
of justification by combat has been ex- 
ploded, there seems to be no way in 
which a gentleman can be sure of keep- 
ing his sacred honor free from specks 
except by plain, ordinary, decent beha- 
vior, and respect for the rights of other 
258 



A Poet and Not Ashamed 

people. If he does wrong he cannot 
fight his way right. He simply has to 
repent and apologize, or take his punish- 
ment quietly according to the rules of 
the game. If he is injured and the law 
cannot help him, the best way for him 
is just to grin and bear it, and let time 
wreak its own revenges. To be sure, if 
the injury is desperate, and he resents it 
in hot blood, the law may excuse him ; 
but society has come to a point of so- 
phistication where it is able to recog- 
nize that a man who endures is usually 
a stronger and a nobler creature than 
the man who gives reins to his temper. 
The notion that one's " honor " can be 
damaged by the action of another per- 
son is pretty generally obsolete. Brag 
is not so good a dog as he was. Bluff 
will not go so far. The code that reg- 
ulates in these days the manners of 
the highest and most influential type of 
American gentleman is actually to be 
found in the New Testament. The 
Christian standard of conduct is respect- 
ed consciously or unconsciously in the 
clubs as well as in the churches. To 
259 



Windfalls of Observation 



forgive one's enemies (or at least to let 
them alone), and to do as one would be 
done by, have always been good sense, 
and in these days by some miracle of 
grace they seem to be getting to be good 
form too. But perhaps we ought not to 
wonder at it, since to the discriminating 
observer the other way is so hopelessly 
absurd, and this age of publicity is nec- 
essarily an age of critical discrimination 
too. 



260 



XVIII 

SOME CHRISTMAS 
SENTIMENTS 




idea about 
receiving. 



SOME CHRISTMAS 
SENTIMENTS 

jECEIVING is traditionally 
such a poor thing compared 
with giving, that there is a 
prevailing tendency to take 
a discouraged view of it, and 
net to make a proper effort to make of it 
as good a thing as possible. It is capa- The ri^ht 
ble of development into a very pleasant 
accomplishment, however better ones 
there may be ; and this much may be 
remembered in its favor to start with, 
that it is the complement of giving, and 
an indispensable incident thereto, so 
that if we were wholly out of patience 
with it on its own account, we must still, 
out of a reasonable regard for the 
golden rule, take our turn at it, or else 
forego the counter-practice. It would 
be a mean person, certainly, who should 
seek to gobble up all the blessings that 
263 



Windfalls of Observation 



givers enjoy, and dodge all the pains and 
difficulties of receivers. 

From the receiver's stand-point all 
gifts may be divided into things that we 
want and things that we don't want. It 
takes no particular skill or grace to re- 
ceive things that we want ; but as, in 
times of general giving, like Christmas, 
the gifts we get are for the most part 
things that we don't want, that branch 
of receivership is worth attention. The 
two ordinary reasons for not wanting 
things are the vulgar one that they do 
not strike us as intrinsically desirable, 
and the more complex reason that we 
don't want to receive them from the 
particular giver. A general remedy ap- 
plicable to reluctances due to either of 
these causes is, to keep strenuously in 
the mind the happiness of the giver in 
giving. Remembering that, you are de- 
lighted with a trifle from someone you 
love, because it makes you happy to 
have been even passively instrumental 
in procuring him the happiness of giv- 
ing ; applying the same principle, you 
can accept ever so costly a gift from 
264 



Some Christmas Sentiments 

someone for whom you care little with- 
out any irksome sense of obligation, 
since, of course, the giver had the best 
of it any way, and it is a great deal 
kinder and more generous to sacrifice 
one's personal inclinations and accept, 
than to refuse. Remember persistently 
that by receiving with due grace you se- 
cure to another person a desirable form 
of happiness. 

The very essence of successful receiv- 
ing is to rise superior to the sense of 
obligation. The purpose of a gift, from 
the giver's point of view, is to make the 
receiver happy. But obligations are apt 
to be irksome, and the receiver who suf- 
fers one to weigh on him, meanly per- 
mits the giver's intentions to be frus- 
trated, and the whole value of the trans- 
action to be destroyed. Appreciation is 
what is wanted. To appreciate is a 
generous emotion, pleasurable to the re- 
ceiver who can experience it, and highly 
agreeable to the giver. Both are blessed 
by it, and mutual love is quickened. 
Contrariwise, over obligations there is 
the trail of the serpent. Once recog- 
265 



Windfalls of Observation 



nized they have to be paid off, and when 
recompense comes in, gift degenerates 
into mere barter, and the true spirit of 
giving exhales and disappears. Receiv- 
ership that yields to the impulse to give 
something back is clumsy and inapt. 
Giving back is mere retaliation. If it 
is revengeful, it is neither pious nor 
philosophical, and the wise receiver will 
have none of it. But oftentimes it is 
merely the refuge of the inexperienced. 
A receiver who knows his business will 
no more resort to it than an expert 
horseman will hold on to the pommel 
of his saddle. The way to receive is to 
receive, not to retaliate. 

To receive trifles from the rich and 
be charmed with them is a simple mat- 
ter. To receive gifts of value from the 
poor and not be oppressed is a finer art, 
but on no account to be neglected. If 
Dives gives you a paper cracker, be as 
charmed with it as if it came from Laz- 
arus ; but on no account fail, if Lazarus 
gives you an heirloom, to receive it with 
as much gayety and as little remorse as 
if it came from Dives, and you knew he 
266 



Some Christmas Sentiments 

would not miss it. Nevertheless, don't 
feel obliged in your heart to undervalue 
Lazarus's heirloom, but be happy rather 
that Lazarus has had feelings toward 
you that have demanded so notable an 
expression. 

After all, little children do it best. 
They are the superlative receivers, and 
it is because they are that we delight 
to give them things. They are frankly 
and delightfully appreciative. Obliga- 
tions sit as lightly on them as air. They 
value their gifts simply by the pleas- 
ure they get out of them, and prefer a 
rag-baby to the deed of a brick house. 
They take a jumping-jack from Mary, 
the laundress, and a jewelled pin from 
Aunt Melinda Croesus, without the least 
distinction of happy approval. The 
nearer we get to their guilelessness, the 
nearer we approach perfection in receiv- 
ing, and in all the Christmas attributes 
besides. 

What Christendom wants at Christmas 
time is simply to be happy. It wants the 
same thing all the rest of the year, but 
267 



Windfalls of Observation 



when Christmas comes its habit is to 
make a special effort and gather, if it 
can, a special harvest of happiness from 
the plantings of the year. And where 
it is not used to being happy and does 
not really know how, it shows a pathetic 
willingness to learn, and even to assume 
an appearance of gayety that it does not 
really feel. Honest effort counts for a 
good deal in any pursuit, and where 
millions of people try to be happy and 
to furnish merriment for one another, a 
very considerable proportion meet with 
reasonable success. But in everything 
where there is a possibility of success 
there is also a hazard of failure, and it 
aftel^hlppi- is no disparagement of a virtuous pur- 
pose to have a merry Christmas, to re- 
member that effort which is misdirected, 
or attempts the impossible, or fails for 
any other reason, increases the bitter- 
ness of the resulting disappointment. 
Some good people will not have the 
heart to attempt any Christmas fun, or 
will fail in it in spite of all they can do. 
It is especially for their consideration 
that these remarks are intended. 
268 



Some Christmas Sentiments 

There was a person once — I dare say 
it would be nearer the truth to say there 
were a million people at various times — 
who, having sought after happiness with 
earnest and protracted strivings, finally 
gave up the quest and went about his 
other business. His conclusion, slowly 
and automatically derived from long pe- 
riods of longing and resulting depres- 
sion, was that he could not get in this 
world what seemed indispensable to his 
satisfaction, and that while it was within 
his powers to live decently and maintain 
an honest walk and conversation, happy 
he could never be, and it would not pay 
him to try any more. So he settled 
down with the feelings of one who has 
been unjustly deprived of his own, to go 
through the motions of living without 
regard to whether he liked it or not. 
But his mind, continuing to operate 
more or less independently, presently 
evolved the reflection that, while it was 
incumbent on every man to live his life 
and to live it as handsomely as he knew 
how, he was under no sort of obligation 
to enjoy it, since happiness was a mere 
269 



Windfalls of Observation 



incident of mundane existence, and not 
at all a necessary condition or an abso- 
lute right. Now, merely to live decently 
whether you like it or not, is like walk- 
ing along the street with your hands in 
your pockets ; whereas to feel obliged 
to gather a complete outfit of happiness 
that you cannot reach, is like running 
your legs off after an elusive butterfly. 
So great w^as this person's relief at the 
conclusion that happiness was not nec- 
essary, and that as a human being he 
was under no ethical bonds to secure it, 
that a weight left his mind and his spir- 
its presently began to rise ; and though 
now and then he would lose his head 
and rush off after an impossible felicity, 
like a half-broken puppy who flushes an 
unexpected bird, when circumstances 
had duly thrashed him back into good 
behavior, he was able to return, not to 
his original gloom, but to the compara- 
tive cheerfulness of the emancipated 
state. 

It makes a great difference in one's 
feelings about happiness whether he ac- 
customs himself to regard it as a luxury, 
270 



Some Christmas Sentiments 

like a million dollars or a yacht, which 
some men have and more don't ; or as 
a comparatively indispensable endow- 
ment, such as a nose, which it is a sort 
of reproach to a man to be without. 
The instinctive appetite for it is, like 
hunger and thirst, a wise provision of 
nature, and designed to incite a salutary 
degree of effort ; but it is quite as capa- 
ble of abuse as the other appetites, and 
needs the same sort of control ; so that 
whoever feels that he must have so 
much happiness every day, whatever 
happens, has reached a point where a 
period of total abstention is likely to do 
him good. 

There are some stars that we cannot 
see at all when we look straight at them, 
but which become visible when we look 
a little to one side. So there are things 
that we cannot get when we try directly 
for them, but which presently fall into 
our laps if only we try hard enough after 
something else. Everybody knows it 
is that way with happiness. Make it a 
primary object and it leads you a doubt- 
ful chase ; but ignore it in the rational 
271 



IVindfalls of Observation 



pursuit of something else, and presently 
you may find it has perched unnoticed 
on your shoulder, like a bird whose tail 
has felt the traditional influence of salt. 
So, of course, the very first essential to 
the achievement of happiness of any 
durable sort is to rise above the neces- 
sity of being happy at all. It may be 
conducive to this sort of achievement to 
remember that great spirits in all times 
have found in their own involuntary dis- 
content a spur to exalted endeavor. Co- 
lumbus had low spirits. Socrates and 
the judicious Hooker had Xantippes. 
Neither Lincoln, nor Balzac, nor Carlyle 
were happy men, but they put saddle 
and bridle on their own depression, and 
rode it under whip and spur into im- 
mortality. 

But let nothing herein set forth in- 
duce any person to trifle with or under- 
value any present happiness of which he 
may already hold the fee. It is very 
pleasant to have, and often very whole- 
some, and as long as it can be kept pure 
and sweet it is a lamentable blunder 
not to cherish it. Nor should anything 
272 



Some Christmas Sentiments 

herein dissuade anyone from making a 
special effort after a particular lot of 
Christmas happiness. Only, worthy peo- 
ple who do make that effort are coun- 
selled to aim a little to one side of the 
mark, that their chance of a bull's-eye 
may be the greater. And the practical 
application of that advice, as everybody 
knows, is just to aim to make the other 
people happy, and trust to getting a 
share incidentally for one's self. 



273 



XIX 

FEATHERS OF LOST 
BIRDS 




FEATHERS OF LOST 
BIRDS 

PROPOS of successful 
achievement, it has been 
said that those who succeed 
are those who go on after 
they are tired. The obser- 
vation bears a family Ukeness to the one 
about genius being the capacity for tak- 
ing infinite pains, and both amount sim- 
ply to this, that the people who arrive 
are those who don't have to stop until 
they get there. To many of us it hap- 
pens that there are bits of thought — 
sometimes they are bits of verse — that 
come into the mind when it is too tired 
to follow them up. It can just grasp 
them and go no farther. Such waifs are 
like the feathers that enthusiastic little 
boys who chase chickens on the farm 
find in their hands when the bird that 
they have almost run down gets away. 
277 



Windfalls of Observation 



Cuvier, they say, could construct a whole 
skeleton from a single bone ; but it isn't 
told even of him that he could fix up a 
whole chicken from a few tail-feathers. 
Nevertheless, these intellectual relics 
are not to be wholly despised. Feathers 
that do not assume to be complete birds 
may still have a secondary sort of merit 
as feathers. 

An odd lot of such strays, that turned 
up the other day in the corner of a 
drawer, included some penncB that in 
hands entirely great might have come to 
something. One that seems to have 
been begotten of an inquiry into the 
grounds of contemporary renown makes 
such an appearance as this : 

So mixed it is, a body hardly knows 
If fame is manufactured goods, or grows. 
Douce man is he whose sense the point imparts 
Where advertising ends and glory starts. 

Another grasp of plumage, gleaned, it 
would seem, in another chase after this 
same bird, disclosed this : 

And here the difference lies, in that, whereas 
What a man did was measure of his glory 

278 



Feathers of Lost Birds 



In those gone days, now gauged by what he has 
He reads his title clear to rank in story. 

The patriot lives, obscure, without alarms ; 

The poet, critics tell us, smoothly twaddles. 
The patent-tonic man it is who storms 

The heights of noise, and fame's high rafter 
straddles ! 
Soap is the stuff — 

With the rest of that last broken 
feather the bird in the hand became the 
bird in the bush. In the next lot : 

No saint's physiognomy goes to my soul 
Like the features that beam from that brown 
aureole — 

suggests a quest after some female 
bird ; and this also seems to belong to 
the same theme : 

More welcome than shade on a hot summer day 
Is the shadow she casts when she's coming my 

way. 
You can see she's a goddess ! Just look at her 

walk ! 
I own I adore her : there*s bones in her talk ! 
Defend me from virgins whose talking is tattle, 
Whose ears are mere trash-bins, whose tongues 

merely rattle ; 

279 



Windfalls of Observation 



Whose brains are but mush, and their judgment a 

sieve — 
Invertebrate discourse is all they can give. 
What profits mere beauty where intellect fails ? 
Oh, give me the woman whose mind will hold 

nails ! 

That was quite a grasp of plumage, to 
be sure. 

When the tennis-ball skims by the fault-finding net 

is an odd feather from some fleet male 
bird, perhaps, who got easily away. 

Not as dry as vast Sahara, 
Just a sand-bank in July, 

suggests a parched throat, and seems 
masculine too ; and so does the sudden 
terminal curve of 

One cannot be a dying swan 
OfEhand. 

It seems as if there might still be fun 

enough in some of the birds that shed 

these things to pay for another chase, 

if only one could get sight of them. 

280 



Feathers of Lost Birds 



The worst of these fowl, though, is that 
the best feathers and the longest legs 
seem to go together. It takes quick 
steps and a power of endeavor to catch 
ostriches. 



281 



XX 

OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE 




OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE 

|Y brother Mundanus and I, 

having baffled for the mo- ^"/f ""^ 
ment the penury that habit- 
ually suppresses our noble 
rages, dined together the 
other night at Delmonico's. After we 
had well eaten and pretty adequately 
drunken, my brother's emotions being 
stirred, he lifted his voice in reproachful 
protest at certain untoward flukes of 
fortune to which it seemed due that he 
and I had been barred out from the large 
possibilities of a life of luxury and pos- 
sible pride, and restricted to the more 
meagre chances of laborious virtue. 
There was our grandfather, that thrifty 
and sagacious merchant, whose annual 
accumulations were of such a satisfacto- 
ry size for so many successive years. If 
only his talent for investing money had 
equalled his ability to make it, what an 
285 



Windfalls of Observation 



though vic- 
tims of a 
series of ca- 
liunitous 
mischances. 



edifying variety of roses would have 
bordered our pathway through life. 
Drinking with decorous respect to this 
gentleman's memory, my brother re- 
called an incident, to us the most pa- 
thetic in our grandfather's career. It 
happened rather more than sixty years 
ago. A succession of prosperous sea- 
sons had swelled his bank balance to un- 
usual proportions. In his quest for an 
investment he learned of the budding 
promise of a Western town named Chi- 
cago. His mind dwelt upon it until he 
finally converted fifty thousand dollars 
into portable assets and travelled out 
to look at the ambitious Western place, 
determined, if he liked its appearance, 
to buy himself a collection of its cor- 
ner lots. Alas ! he found the town was 
swampy, and he caught cold there, and 
brought his assets home again, and pres- 
ently put them with divers others in- 
to woollen mills, some of which burned 
down, and others after a time hung fire, 
and were sold at a grievous valuation just 
before the war broke out and made the 
everlasting fortunes of their purchasers. 
286 



Outrageous Fortune 



At this harrowing reminiscence a tear 
ran down my brother's nose and fell 
into his champagne ; but restraining his 
feelings, he went on to recall how one or 
two decades later, our father, at that 
time a vigilant young attorney in Go- 
tham, had formed a favorable opinion 
of the tract known as Murray Hill, and, 
borrowing a convenient sum of money, 
had purchased some acres of land in it, 
intending to hold them for future possi- 
bilities. But in a year or two, having a 
salutary horror of debt, he took counsel 
of precaution, and sold his land again 
and bought back the notes he had given 
for the purchase money. Which of the 
contemporary Croesi owned the lots now 
my brother did not know, nor did he 
care to learn. 

Coming down still another generation, 
my brother recalled the time when, not 
many years ago, he and I were solicited 
to share the ownership and fortunes of 
a journal whose infant soul was just 
on the point of fluttering into life. But, 
mindful of the mortality statistics of in- 
fant journals, we withheld our hands 
287 



Windfalls of Observation 



and stayed where we were. Alas again ! 
That infant throve prodigiously, and 
now its erstwhile anxious owners re- 
joice in town and country domiciles and 
invigorate their energies behind fleet 
quadrupeds on the Riverside drive. But 
my brother and I still dwell in modest 
hired tenements, and rely upon the 
street-cars for our transportation. 

Seeing that these reminiscences 
seemed to have a depressing effect upon 
my brother's spirits, I hastened to sug- 
gest to him such consoling considera- 
tions as came into my mind. I re- 
minded him, in the first place, that 
inasmuch as we and our fathers had 
lived in times of prodigious industrial 
development, such opportunities as we 
and they had missed had been the com- 
mon lot of their and our contempo- 
raries, and it was the exception to find 
a man born to fair possibilities in life 
who could not recur in his family annals 
to just such chances of being very rich 
are con- as hc had recalled. I told him of the 
7u7^re/er pcrenuial despondency with which my 
friend Robinson looked back to a day 
288 



Outrageous Fortune 



when a friend of his had come to him 
with a handful of Dhudeen & Popocata- 
petl mining stock which he had en- 
treated him to purchase at eight dollars 
a share. But Robinson being a prudent 
man, had declined, and year after year 
since then had watched the gradual up- 
rising of that D. & P. stock, until each 
of those eight-dollar shares was now rep- 
resented by certificates readily market- 
able at two thousand dollars. 

I went on to remind him that if our 
grandfather had bought those corner 
lots in Chicago, our family, which is 
large and not of an especially frugal 
temperament, would have tried very 
earnestly to live up to the possibilities 
of life which such a purchase would 
eventually have opened. One thing I 
thought worth mentioning was, that if 
our father had inherited such a great 
fortune he would not have found time 
to raise so many children, and my 
brother and I might never have been 
born, or might have died in infancy from 
some costly foreign fever. I reminded 
him, too, that our sisters would doubtless 
289 



Windfalls of Observation 



have married counts or possibly spend- 
thrift dukes, and would have lived abroad 
at great expense to the estate, and our 
older brother, who has a prejudice 
against work as it is, would undoubt- 
edly have enjoyed life in a manner that 
would have made necessary some heavy 
mortgages ; so that it was easily possi- 
ble that we would have found ourselves, 
at our age, no richer than we are now, 
and much less capable both of earning a 
living and of living on such incomes as 
we could earn. 

My brother demurred gently at my 
gloomy estimate of the demoralizing 
tendencies of wealth, but I continued. 
I admitted that if our father had held 
on to his Murray Hill lots, the property 
might have lasted our time ; but I re- 
minded him that in that case we should 
now have been middle-aged men who 
had experienced expensive pleasures 
and eaten and drunk rather too much 
for our good for at least twenty years. 
ia be our- Our charactcrs would have been feebler 
for lack of most of the effort and self- 
denial we have practised during that 
290 



selves as 
ive are.. 



Outrageous Fortune 



period ; the money we had spent would 
be gone, and we would have detriment 
rather than benefit to show for it. The 
pleasure we had had, being past, would 
be of no value to us at all, and would 
impair rather than increase our abilities 
to enjoy in the future. A continuance 
of the sort of life we had been leading 
would not be affirmatively pleasurable, 
but merely a necessary condition of tol- 
erable existence. If we had had chil- 
dren, we should be apprehensive of the 
effect of our examples on their welfare ; 
but the chances were that we should be 
childless clubmen, with shining scalps, 
and just beginning to be disturbed by 
ominous twinges in our great toes. 

As to that last chance my brother 
had alluded to, of our gaining a compe- 
tence by our own sagacity and good 
luck, that seemed to me to offer a more 
reasonable opening for regret. Never- 
theless I explained to him that, even if 
we had been in easy circumstances for 
only eight or nine years, we should not rdher than 
have been quite the same men that we Vav'/S. ' 
were, nor would our possible gains have 
291 



IVindfalls of Observation 



been unattended with losses. In my 
own case I was sure, for example, that 
a lucky stroke ten years ago would have 
made such a difference in my associates 
that I never should have fallen in with 
my present wife. My children, in con- 
sequence, if I had had any children, 
would have had different colored eyes 
and hair, and would have been different 
children altogether. I could not think 
with equanimity of myself as married to 
a person, however estimable, who is to 
me in fact an entire stranger ; or as the 
father of a young brood with whom, as 
things have gone, I have no acquain- 
tance, and in whom I take only a remote 
and dispassionate interest. The man I 
might have been, I said, is as much a 
stranger to me as the Prince of Wales. 
The man I am — that I have worked 
over, and endured, and sat up nights 
with — is inextricably associated with my 
most intimate concerns. For better or 
worse, I would rather go on with him as 
he is than change him for a richer, or 
even a better man, developed on differ- 
ent lines, under different conditions, and 
292 



Outrageous Fortune 



living with a wife and children that be- 
long, as it is, to somebody else. 

" As for you," I continued, " not be- 
ing married, you are not affected by all 
the considerations that influence me. 
But if you had made a lucky hit ten 
years ago you probably would have mar- 
ried ; and when you consider the vari- 
ous chances of matrimony, including the 
cost of children's shoes and the pro- 
pensity of male offspring to go to the 
dogs, are you sure that you would dare 
to shift blindfold out of the shoes you 
occupy now into those of the man you 
might have been if you had had better 
luck ? " 

My brother sniffed a little, but very 
gently. I think my arguments im- 
pressed him somewhat ; but his philoso- 
phy is a trifle less ascetic than mine, and 
it is only on clearer days than common 
that he can fix his gaze upon the prom- 
ised land intensely enough to drive the 
flesh-pots of Egypt out of his head. He 
may still be mourning in his heart over 
those corner lots in Chicago. I don't 
know. But even if my arguments failed 

293 



Windfalls of Observation 



to have a convincing effect upon him, 
there are some hundreds of thousands 
of other vainly regretful Americans 
with whom possibly they may find more 
favor. 



294 



XXI 

CERTAIN INDIVIDUAL 
VIEWS OF MAJOR BRACE 




CERTAIN INDIVIDUAL 
VIEWS OF MAJOR BRACE 

F there is a thing I have set 
my heart on," observed Ma- 
jor Brace, at one minute be- 
fore cocktail time on Satur- 
day afternoon, " it is that 
when my last hour begins to strike I 
shall have a comfortable and interest- 
ing departure. Under what circum- 
stances a man shall be born into this 
world of doubtful compensations, it 
does not lie with him to determine. 
He cannot select his parents or his 
physician, and even his own deport- 
ment is a thing outside of his volition. 
But how he shall be married and how he 
shall die are matters that it should fall 
to him to regulate. A man ought to be 
married cheerfully and in good company. 
However he may feel about it personal- 
ly, he should remember that marriage is 
297 



Windfalls of Observation 



As io some 



commended by the church, and that the 
state makes a point of its encourage- 
ment. Whatever personal misgivings he 
may have about it he should put aside 
when it comes to the point, and adorn 
his brow (figuratively) with garlands and 
throw just as penetrating a glamour of 
individual cheerfulness over the scene 
as it lies in his power to diffuse. A man 
at his own wedding must just rub out of 
his mind those texts about man that is 
born of woman being liable to discom- 
forts as the sparks fly upward, and as to 
how all our years over seventy are labor 
and sorrow and don't pay. Nunc biben- 
dum and pulsandum tellus are the right 
sentiments for him, and his frame of 
mind should correspond with them. For 
it is his duty to alleviate the terrors of 
matrimony and so to conduct himself 
that other youths taking note of his be- 
havior may find encouragement therein. 
" Now the terrors of death " (one ! 



possible ter- two ! three ! four ! five ! ping! " Martini 
^delth, cocktail, please " ) " are not to be com- 

pared with those of matrimony, and it 
must be a simpler thing to die hand- 
298 



Individual Views of Major Brace 

somely than to be creditably married. 
Moreover, though men may need encour- 
agement to get married they can all be 
trusted to die, whether anyone shows 
them how or not. So a dying man's ex- 
ample is not so important a matter, and 
it is entirely reasonable for him to hope 
that in the arrangements that are made 
for him to expire, his own personal 
comfort may be the first consideration. 
I suppose we have all figured on our 
last feelings and our last words. Of 
course, if a man falls down an elevator 
shaft, or is run over by the cars, or 
dies violently or in severe pain, that 
spoils it all, and his preliminary ar- 
rangements are so much wasted time. 
But if he dies comfortably in bed and in 
good spirits, it is going to make a dif- 
ference to him who is there to see him 
off. Of course no one wants hilarity at 
such a time, but courage, gumption, and 
serenity are as pleasant at life's close as 
at any point in its duration. The great 
point is that you don't want a lot of 
people around that you have got to en- 
tertain. When you cast your lingering 
299 



Windfalls of Observation 



look behind, you want to see only such 
people as have made it easier for you to 
live, and not too many of them. They 
are the sort who will make it easier for 
you to die. You don't want anyone to be 
pleased, neither would you have anyone 
distressed. Above all things you want 
to be quit of people who are thinking 
too much about their own behavior to 
care anything about yours ; of people 
who want to make formal remarks suit- 
able to the occasion ; of people of large 
experience, which, they think, qualifies 
them to be professional extinguishers ; 
of all persons, however estimable, whose 
presence is a constraint upon you ; of 
people who want to repeat their favorite 
Bible texts to you, when your mind is al- 
ready running on your own. 

" For myself such misgivings as I may 
feel about the nature of my last mo- 
ments are largely due to my conviction 
that when my aunt Samantha hears that 
I am on my last legs, she will take the 
first train for my bedroom. And from 
the time she gets there, and sits down 
on the edge of the bed, all the comfort 
300 



Individual yiews of Major Brace 

will be gone out of the proceedings. 
She will want to run the entire show, and 
she will run it as if it were a dime dis- 
play that went by clock-work. Saman- 
tha's effect on humor is that of chloride 
of lime on a smell. It is impossible to 
talk anything but commonplace where 
she is in earshot. What my last words 

will be if she is there But she shan't 

be there. I won't tolerate it. If she 
comes I shall just say, ' Please give me 
those trowsers.' And I will excuse my- 
self and come down and die at the club. 

" I think that I could get along," con- 
tinued the Major, as he twirled again the %tM'give 
protruding tip of the little bell on the o^^^f'*^*- 
table at the club, " if it were not for the 
people who are willing to forgive my 
past. They are an unremittent source 
of worriment to me. They are constant- 
ly at work undermining the standard 
of worthlessness that I have set for my- 
self, and loading me up with new pur- 
poses, the fulfilment of which is utterly 
beyond any possibility that I contain. 
If people — (Oh, bring me, etc.) — if peo- 
301 



Windfalls of Observation 



pie only had gumption enough to re- 
member that a man's past is nine-tenths 
of all there is to him, and that to for- 
give his past is only another way of 
knocking him on the head and prepar- 
ing his remains for burial, perhaps some 
of my dear friends would learn to have 
more compunction about forgiving me. 

" I resent the idea that because I spend 
only a couple of hours a day in an office, 
and get up late mornings, and go to bed 
late nights, and earn no money, and con- 
sume certain judicious quantities of alco- 
hol and tobacco every day, my life is a 
failure, my habits a failure, and my past 
a thing to be persistently forgiven. Why, 
bless your heart, I like my past. If it 
had been different, these simple pleas- 
ures that make life fairly profitable to 
me would fail to satisfy me. For ex- 
ample, if I had formed habits of work I 
should be a slave to them, like all the 
other workers. Work gets hold of men 
as opium does, until the time comes 
when the amount they must take every 
day to keep them reasonably contented 
is more than their strength can stand. 
302 



Individual yiews of Major Brace 

When they reach that point they drop. 
You read of cases of it every day ; of 
men upon whom this fierce work-habit 
grew with all its attendant desires and 
ambitions, until they fell in their tracks 
with the harness on them. They had 
no particular fun ; they were of no par- 
ticular use to their friends ; they were 
just the hired men of society whose 
business it was to earn money to pay 
for things that people wanted to sell to 
them. As long as they were short of 
money it was well enough for them to 
toil, because, you know, you must have 
some money in this world if you are to 
have any comfort. But when once their 
accumulations were adequate to support 
them, their past became a hindrance 
and a burden to them — something really 
fit to be forgiven, if possible, and got 
rid of at any cost. For, you see, it was 
simply a task-master, forbidding them 
to stop work and threatening them with 
misery, and even a premature death, if 
they altered their habits. 

"Why, such a past as mine — (Thank 
you ; put it there) — is a possession of 

303 



Windfalls of Observation 



inestimable value to a man who can af- 
ford it. It is so easy to live up to, so 
patient, so forgiving, so encouraging, 
and exacts so little. A man who has 
lived at high pressure must go at high 
pressure till his boiler bursts, but we 
low-pressure chaps slide along year after 
year, burning no great amount of fuel, 
not hauling many cars to be sure, but 
running so smoothly and with so little 
fuss that, when we do finally bring up, 
no one is inconvenienced and we hardly 
know it ourselves. 

" It is a fact that I have always had 
serious compunctions about doing very 
much, particularly for other people, for 
fear of the monstrous inconvenience so- 
ciety in general, and my dependents in 
particular, might be put to when I died. 
You know how it is ; when one of those 
hustling gentlemen who habitually crowd 
ten days' work into every week throws 
up his hand there is a wail of despair. 
All his womenfolks are disheartened, 
and the men look at one another and 
groan and say : ' My gracious ! I won- 
der who is going to take up Jones's 

304 



Individual Fiews of Major Brace 

job ! ' No one takes any comfort at his 
funeral. The mourners are ashamed 
of him for letting up, and twitch their 
shoulders nervously in dread of the 
weight of some of his burdens. It is a 
dreary business all around. 

" But just you wait and see what a 
pleasant, cheerful episode it will be 
when I go. There will be — at least I 
hope there will — just a proper amount 
of we-could-have-better-spared-a-better- 
man sort of regret. Men will say : * So 
Brace is gone. What a worthless old 
creature he was ; and yet, somehow, he 
was handy to have about ! ' A good 
many people will come to the funeral, I 
think, partly out of an affectionate habit 
and partly because it will be a pleasant 
funeral with no broken hearts in it, 
and no horrid incubus of responsibili- 
ties perched up on the coffin and peer- 
ing around among the mourners for a 
pair of suitable shoulders to shift itself 
upon. Nothing but my past enables me 
to look forward to such a funeral as 
that ; and to forgive my past, you see, 
is simply to discredit all my future. I 

305 



Windfalls of Observation 



wish people might not forgive it any 
more. 

, , ., " If there is a social function that 
parties. I dcspisc With embittered animosity, 
broke out the Major again after a pause 
of grumbling meditation, " it is the fam- 
ily party. I hate it not less for what it 
includes than for what it leaves out. 
It is a notorious fact that neither con- 
sanguinity nor ties of marriage afford 
ground for the imputation of congenial 
social qualities. That I should feel an 
interest of a certain sort in the nephew 
of the aunt of my wife, or the sister-in- 
law of the mother-in-law of my stepson, 
may be reasonable. I am ready to go 
bail for them when they are arrested for 
crime, to be a witness to their wills, 
and possibly to go on their bonds in a 
reasonable amount when that is a condi- 
tion precedent to their profitable em- 
ployment. But why I should be huddled 
together with these worthy people for 
purposes of festivity I fail to discern. 

" I have been to a wedding. My 
cousin Sally got married. I like my 
306 



Individual yiews of Major Brace 

cousin Sally a good deal, and I would 
have been glad to have fun at her wed- 
ding ; but — good heavens ! — my cousin 
is wearing black edges on her writing- 
paper this spring, and it was held that it 
ought to be a private wedding, with no 
one but the family. Sally was there ; 
her father and mother ; her three broth- 
ers and their wives ; the bridegroom ; 
his father and mother ; his grandmoth- 
er ; his three sisters and the husbands 
of two of them ; the brothers of the 
two husbands of the groom's sisters and 
their wives ; the parents-in-law of Sally's 
brothers and their families ; first and 
second cousins, uncles, aunts, and step- 
relatives of the contracting parties. 

" Gracious ! It made me feel as if I 
had got mixed up with the Mafia, there 
was such a dreadful sense of conspiracy 
and a common, dreadful purpose about. 
There were people enough of merit 
there, but they were not grouped on a 
fit system. Nobody's crowd was com- 
plete. Everyone who had friends in his 
society gang with whom he liked to con- 
sort on such an occasion was separated 

307 



Windfalls of Observation 



from two-thirds of them, and had rela- 
tives served up to him instead. I want- 
ed to drink champagne. I always do at 
weddings when I have any feeling for 
the * parties,' but the gloom was so deep 
on me that I dared not begin. At last 
I got Jack Robinson off in a corner, 
away from everybody that we were re- 
lated to, and we guzzled monotonously 
and without enthusiasm until it was de- 
cent to go home. I tell you, family 
parties are a baneful business ; bad for 
those who are excluded and worse for 
those who are not. I cannot think of 
any end they serve which is important 
enough to warrant them. 

" I heard of another informal wedding 
the other day. The bride invited a 
score of friends to dinner. The groom 
was of the party, so was the clergyman, 
and the wedding and the black coffee 
came about the same time. Now that 
was something like. 

" There was imparted to me lately, 
Of gossip, under due exactions of secrecy," the 
Major went on, as the bell quivered 
308 



Individual Fiews of Major Brace 

once more under his impetuous finger, 
" a tremendous story, involving facts 
bearing in a highly interesting manner 
upon the moral characters of sundry 
contemporaries. I rarely know any 
startling gossip except what I am able 
to glean from the newspapers, and I was 
not hunting for recondite facts of a per- 
sonal nature when the tale I speak of 
came to my knowledge. I was utterly 
flabbergasted by it. Where I had con- 
jectured my informant had ascertained ; 
but her certainty far outran my sus- 
picions, for where I had read indiscretion 
her knowledge joined to mine brought 
out guilt in large exclamatory lettering. 
I was astonished at the story, and I have 
been scarcely less astonished at its ef- 
fect upon my inner consciousness. At 
first it filled me up to the exclusion of 
all other thought, and threatened to get 
itself unreasonably important for the 
reason that the knowledge of it left me 
with nothing else to say. Since then 
there has been some natural shrinkage 
in it, due to the action of time and the 
impact of affairs, and with careful discre- 

309 



Windfalls of Observation 



tion I have talked scallops out all around 
the edge of it (much as children nibble 
around a flat cake of maple sugar), leav- 
ing untouched the substantial central 
tale which I am in honor bound not to 
reveal. 

" The reason I mention it here is not 
to tantalize any one with the shadow of 
a story whose substance is locked up, 
but for the sake of discussing whether 
it has paid me to know this story at all. 
There have been inconveniences about 
it, the wear and tear of keeping it to my- 
self, and the disagreeable variation in 
my sentiments toward some of the per- 
sons whom it concerned. It did not 
make me think better of any one abso- 
lutely, though my estimates of one or 
two persons relatively to one another 
have shifted. I find, however, that I am 
ahead on the whole transaction, because, 
while I am not so closely attached to 
the victims of the tale as to be distressed 
by it, it comes near enough to me to 
make my interest in it very lively and 
exhilarating. Without the least desire 
to judge these contemporaries, I find 
310 



Individual Fiews of Major Brace 



myself in a slightly better position to 
form just opinions as to the merits or 
faults of their future behavior. Knowl- 
edge is power, and power is pleasant, 
even though it is limited in its possibili- 
ties of good. I have not yet come to 
the point where I would unknow that 
tremendous story if I could. 

" Of course, if I could undo the facts 
of the story I would gladly do that. 
What disappoints me is the apparent 
defect in my benevolence, which, the 
facts being unalterable, makes me prefer 
to know them, though apparently they 
cannot in any legitimate fashion promote 
my happiness. Can I console myself 
with the pretence that I love truth too 
much to part with such a piece of it? 
I fear not. I fear that the love of truth 
has little to do with the case. I fear I 
must conclude that unregenerate man 
takes a real pleasure in being fully 
abreast of the times in the knowledge of 
his neighbor's misdeeds, for the reason 
perhaps (for one reason) that he is con- 
tinually comparing himself in an auto- 
matic sort of way with his neighbors, 



Windfalls of Observation 



and information that makes him think 
worse of them makes him think better, 
by contrast, of himself. * Certain it is,' 
as Thackeray assures us, * that scan- 
dal is good brisk talk,' and that * an ac- 
quaintance grilled, scored, devilled, and 
served with mustard and cayenne pepper 
excites the appetite.' Whether it is also 
true, as he goes on to aver, that * a slice 
of cold friend, with currant jelly, is but 
a sickly, unrelishing meat,' is another 
matter, and I am not going to admit it ; 
at least not on this drink." 



312 



kfH 22 1904 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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